Background Building Scratchbuild

I needed a break from the long, tedious, and increasingly complex 'main terminal' project, and I've been thinking about some different ideas to create cheap, quick, and reasonably realistic background buildings.  So I spent about a week and came up with the "Banal Apartments" building and the "908 building".

The Banal was my first idea, and its really an iteration on the same techniques I used on my 'modern flatiron' scratch-build last Fall.  The idea is simple: Print a window frame pattern onto clear transparency sheets (I have a laser printer fortunately, but I expect this would work with an ink-jet as well), adhere the transparency to a sheet of clear acrylic (shown with the blue protective film below) and then add various strips of styrene in different sizes to give the effect of a building.

 Once the transparency is on the acrylic (of course, you need to make sure your printed window frames match up to your styrene sections), the styrene is glued onto the acrylic.  Easy.  I'm starting to believe that paper or thin card stock could easily (and more cheaply) replace the styrene.

There are no 'floors' behind the exterior, and some windows were blacked out with paint while others were left transparent.  The entire interior is lit by several separate lengths of self-adhesive SMD LED lighting strips.  You can see the back 'wall' for the entire building on the right in the below photo.

Basically, the finished exterior of the "Banal"!

I'm trying to overcome my natural bias against using paper or cardstock as I've seen so many interesting results from other modellers.  While the signage and window details below are printed on transparency and decals, the actual exterior walls on the ground floor is just color printed paper ( okay, impossible to tell in the below photo, but you can see it better in the top photo). 

 

The "908" building is actually based on a building I drive by on my way to work.  I'm guessing its a 1960's/1970's condo building with floor to ceiling, tinted windows, and a rather plan concrete exterior.  What I find intriguing about the prototype was that despite the buildings rather stark appearance, the different window coverings and lights used in each unit made it an interesting building to model.

I used acrylic sheets again for this building, but no transparency for windows.  I did use some widow tinting material to get that dark, smoky look.  The below photo shows the careful alignment of the exterior 'concrete' floor pieces, which are not only a part of the prototype, they cover yet more foam core 'floors' that separate each floor and act as mounting places for the LED bulbs (not lighting strips in this building, which gives it a different effect).

The ground floor for this building was straight modernism.  The building gets its '908' name for no other reason than those numbers looked good to go on the bare concrete walls!  When complete, I may add some bushes to the front of the concrete areas for extra character.

 The photo below likely will not be the final position of these two buildings, but its a good place to temporarily position them until I get more progress on this area of the city.

As always...thanks for visiting my blog!