Basework

Painting and messifying the display stand

In case you forgot already, the last time I had finished with the plastic plates and that I had applied the ballast here and there. After that the whole setup was primed gray. Simple and quick.
The part of the stand that's not a part of the display was painted with Tamiya's XF-10 Flat Brown. Somehow I recall that there were some spots I painted badly, but then again, the already uneven coating might end up looking just fine and interetsing instead of a boring flatness. Maybe I'll drybrush some lighter brown here and there anyway.

A weather-ruined frontyard of a hangar

As with the stand itsel, a plain grey surface would've been really boring. So I applied a slightly hasty layer of darker grey on the slates and then drybrushed the edges gently with a lighter gray, using my trusty Vallejo greys. After that setup had dried I dug out the washes I received in the early summer. The concrete slabs were washed with Vallejo's grey and the gravely parts with brown wash (Model Wash 76.516 Grey; Model Wash 76.513 Brown).

I think the stand looked now nicely autumnish and to enforce that feeling I applied some puddles here and there with my old, trusty Vallejo's acrylic water (Still Water 26230). According to the internet, I could've done something to make the puddles stand out even better but let them be as they are, you may see them from a proper angle, if they're visible at all.

The everspreading weeds

When all this had cured properly overnight, I superglued a couple of Woodland Scenics' grass tufts in the edge of the bigger gravel patch and the broken concrete slab. Then I dropped a bunch of droplets of superglue in random places along the slab's edges and dabbed tiny amounts of WS foliage on said drops.

This had got me started with the weird details so I dug out the summer's Vallejo pigment bottles and the old Tamiya pigment box. From the first set I used the grey powder mostly on the edges of the concrete pieces and the light brown stuff on the gravel, wherever it happened to be. Then from the older kit I used "mud" on the top parts (in the picture) especially and some bigger empty areas, the "wet sand" around the bottom right, where the gravel lies.

Test photos

 

My idea was that the display stand would be a depiction of a front yard of a hangar on a slightly ill-kept air base, where the weeds are returning slowly but steadily. To my horrible eyes the effect is just what I was going for, but who can tell how you, dear readers and photo-oglers take it...