I’ll admit it, I suck at airbrushing. It’s probably not helped by the fact I only own a cheap compressor without a regulator, and an even cheaper Chinese knock off airbrush. At any rate I very rarely airbrush because it’s always a fraught affair, with depressing watery looking results. However since I’m still assembling and basing Mantic Red Brick terrain for “This is Not a Test”, I wanted to add a little something to one of the larger, blank brick walls in the set.
One of the inspirations for This is Not a Test is the Fallout series of video games, so I decided to borrow some of their imagery. Everybody loves the refreshing taste of Nuka Cola right!? The first photo above shows you the finished, stencilled artwork. The stencil was draw by hand on a piece of A4 paper and then cut out with a very blunt Xacto (I should have changed the blade). The main wall was painted the same way as the rest of the Red Brick terrain I’ve built.
The stencil was then attached to the wall with low tack painter’s masking tape and blutack. The blutack was rolled into tiny pinhead sized balls and slipped under the tricky parts of the stencil that wouldn’t lie flat against the wall. Namely the central parts of the larger letters like the ‘N’ and ‘C’. A little more blutack was used to mask out the centre of the ‘o’s and ‘a’s which I’d cut out of the stencil.
The whole mess was then surrounded by a plastic shopping bag which was fixed around the edges with more masking tape. I then took it all out to the garage and sprayed the stencil with Kilrust vehicle white metal primer – because that’s the only white spray I had to hand. After drying overnight, the bleed around a few edges was tidied up by hand and the letters over-painted with a little Vallejo “Iraqi Sand” and pure white mixed together. It’s hard to see in that top photo but I couldn’t resist adding a ‘TM’ marker by hand down in the usual bottom right corner. The wall was then finished up with brown tinted floor varnish over the top and the whole lot was matt varnished with Army Painter “Anti-Shine”.
I’m pretty happy with the end result, and it really wasn’t too much work to add something visually interesting to the large blank wall. I might try cutting another stencil for some more Hirst Arts based tanks and pipes I’m painting up as well.
If you’re wondering why the sign says ‘Queen St’, that’s because I live in New Zealand, where every town or city of a reasonable size has at least one ‘Queen’ or ‘Victoria’ street in it. Finally here’s the back of the terrain piece with an old, headswapped GW Necro Scavvie for scale.