Shinto Temple Complex, Part Deux

Another month, another temple complex commission but this time for Fall-In. To be honest, I can't say there's much different here than the last one I did for Fighting Kentuckian, though there were some changes in color tone. Oddly, I also had issues with my vinyl filler material adhering to the wood - whether that had something to do with my filler or this batch of wood, I have no idea.

The walls this time are a flat off-white finish, while all the red lacquer is built up from multiple layers of Tamiya paints. I started by undercoating all the pieces in Flat Red, then added areas of shadow and highlight by adding in Purple and Orange respectively, and finally applied multiple coats of Red to really bring out a depth of color. Natural wood was done by using long strokes of various shades of tans, browns, and beiges running with the grain. Once given a light, slightly diluted coat of a mid-tone tan, this melds the colors and produces an effect that looks vaguely similar to wood. The pantile roofs were airbrushed with Tamiya Flat Black, then given multiple layers of a 50/50 mix of Tamiya OD Green and Dark Green, and finally highlighted with Olive Green. To give everything a more used look, I added Vallejo European Dirt Wash along the edges of roofs, along walls, and on upper horizontal surfaces.

The "stone" texture is achieved by applying multiple layers of gesso with a stabbing motion of the brush. Unfortunately, the base being MDF means that you have to apply a lot of gesso, but once that's dry it provides a nice rough texture without destroying any texture on the MDF itself. For example, on the gate and bell tower bases, there were lines showing the edges of the stone tiles. As the gesso shrinks, it does fill these lines, but taking a sharp Xacto blade and rescribing them was simple and didn't destroy the gesso either. Once dry, I applied multiple shades of medium through light grey paint, edge highlighting with almost pure white.