I recently painted the Fire Escape part of the TTCombat Rooftop Accessories MDF terrain kit. I had a blast painting this up and tried some new techniques that I thought I would share to help make this kit pop on the table top.

One of the first things I did on this project after assembly is play with it a bunch and forget about it. It’s pretty easy to do when you have a back log of miniatures to paint. However, watching a Sorastro’s video for Urban Terrain I was hit by inspiration by some of the techniques he showcased. The biggest one, and the one I thought would help TTCombat Urban terrain the most was the technique where he stipples on watered down spackling paste onto the sides of foam board. Well, in this case, I was doing it to the outside of the MDF to give it more of a textured look. As you can see in the pictures. I think this worked.

Once dry, I used Minitaire Raven Black to put a base coat of color on the entire piece with my Badger Patriot 105 airbrush. Once that was done, I then cleaned the airbrush and moved onto Minitaire Base Gray and focused more of the color on the bulk gray areas of the structure, especially where highlights were important. With the airbrush work complete, it was to the painting table.

For the brick work, I moved onto Reaper Crimson Red 29801 as the base for the brick tone. I then highlighted this with Reaper Heraldic Red 09402. I am really pleased how this turned out and it was one of those happy little painting accidents and not really something I planned when I started out. I also used the Heraldic Red to paint in the letters of the door on the structure. Though I did paint the background behind the lettering first with Reaper Misty Gray 09090. The rest of the door was painted with Reaper Earth Brown 09029 and then little black scuff marks were painted on using Reaper Pure Black 09037.

I did add a small door latch to the door as well. This was cut out of just scrap plastic sprue that I had laying around. When all of the painting was done, I added a piece of hard clear plastic I cut out from a scrap blister pack for the window of the door. For the graffiti I spent some time on Google looking for sample work. A great way to search for inspiration for Gotham terrain, which is what I was doing here, was to look at work that was done in the Arkham series video games. All of the work was free handed based on that. Just take your time with any graffiti work you do using watered down paints to sketch out your plan before bulking it in.

I finished the project with a few posters that I printed to standard printed paper. Once that’s complete, just cut and glue them to the building with PVA glue. If you want a poster to look like it’s been ripped off the building, just rip the poster before you paste on half of it.