Painting Pottersville

I've been busy gluing MDF like a mad thing, resulting in an impressive street of buildings.

The Sarissa buildings all go together quickly. One quibble is the upper floors are open concept. But I used some heavy card stock to make simple partition walls.

I also used some heavy art board to make some lengths of paving to create alleys between the buildings. Dirty deeds need dark alleys, and I have lots of trash cans that need a place to go.

After spray painting with a light tan, painting has gone quickly. Both buildings took maybe 3 hours each.

I've also had a plastic toy pony stable from Ertl that Pete found. I added a back door with my Dremel Tool and some card and stuck it on a base.  Looking at most commercial properties you see a lot of clutter and junk (especially prior to 5S and Kaizen ), so I added piles of construction materials around it to give some cover and character. After painting I added some tufts and weeds. Taller weeds fill spaces that I couldn't reach with sand.

Plastic coffee stirrers become copper pipes. Plastic tubes become concrete pipes. Wooden fence posts from cheap Christmas village fences become stacks of fence pickets. Bamboo skewers get turned into a stack of lumber. I've had stacks of construction materials made as scatter terrain for years. Those will be out front or beside the building.

Trying a test layout to see where I'm at for things like fences and sidewalks. It will be nice to deploy the street lights and newsstand, complete with paperboy, at last. The cloth is 4x4.

I can push the buildings right to the edge and leave wider streets too. But I had an idea to make walled yards complete with laundry behind the tenements. The reverse of the cloth is dark grey. Might be smarter to use that side and then make gravel yards for the construction company and the scrap yard. As you can see above I still have an empty corner to fill.

A 4x4 area should give room for up to 8 gangs to deploy I hope.