I found some great plastic boxes at Target the other day. On the left in the picture. Great for turning into buildings! I've tested some spray paint that says it bonds with plastic but paint is rubbing off pretty easily. I washed the piece and it already has a textured surface so it should need roughing up with sandpaper. Anyone have recommendations?
If it's "food safe", then it's probably polypropylene or PET, and both resist many spray paint solvent carriers. EVEN "etch primers".
You should look for the recycle triangle of arrows. Then check the spray label to see if it works. Plastic primers or adhesion promoters I know do not list PET; tricky one as chromedog said. Some list PP, but recommend sanding in all cases. Other option is creating a "wrapping", similar to old "green toy soldiers" and Mod Podge or urethane varnish, and hope it holds. Sanding should help. Use flexible paints over that.
Yeah, giving them a light debuff sanding will often help. Fine sandpaper. The idea is to take the shine off, not scratch deep grooves into the plastic.
They are already a bit textured but i'll try that out. Here's my test. Going to look fantastic if I can get this paint right. The red paint is working well. It's a paint+primer. When I scratch it with a finger nail it will mark it a bit but no paint will come off. If i do it to the tan, it comes off down to the plastic. I tried just a light bit of flat primer and it didn't help. I'm going to try more.
Here's an update. I think it's come along pretty well! I now know to do things in a certain order. I got some texture paint on the weekend for the roof tops but found that it takes a lot to over up the red that I had already painted. Also i hadn't put enough sealer on the red paint and the blue tape I used, pulled up paint. So first paint bottom black, then texture paint, then the roof rims. Next I'm going to try making windows out laser cut acrylic or wood. I'd rather the thinnest acrylic or maybe thick paper.
I forgot to add in an image of the inside. I'm thinking of adding things to the interior for the hell of it. You can see how easy the "roof" lid goes on and off.
Little bored today so I worked on the larger building. I unfortunately forgot to put a door on before I painted lol. On the second image you can kind of see the gap between the buildings but I don't feel too bad about that. I think most of the time i'm going to set up like the first one because it's more interesting.
Impressive stuff. Just remember that one of the biggest advantages of box buildings like these is that you can nest them for easy storage. If you want to fill out the interiors, I would recommend that you go low profile like the doors or removable pieces. It's more fiddly to set up, but when you put it away you won't take up half a closet.
They don't nest very unfortunately. They stack. However, the great thing about them is, I can put a lot of small pieces on the inside. Things like short walls, pylons, boxes and crates, etc.
New update. I found some cool stuff at Hobby Lobby in the paper craft section! The below floor in the box is actually a sheet of paper. You can't tell that easily but the hexes are actually metallic ink. The second paper i got just because it looks cool. It's this awesome color shift metallic paper. No idea how to use it yet lol. I just saw it and went oooh shiney!
That's a great idea. It can't be printed on so I need to come up with some way to put something over it like a decal or print on acetate. I'm not sure that's even possible anymore.
It looks like they still make acetate sheets for over-head projectors. I might try to pick some up but I don't have a good printer :( Another thing that would be even better is to print decals! I forgot I have decal paper! But again bad printer. I'll need to take to Staples or something to print it. I admit the posters i put on the building were printed at work lol. But not in the office for... no idea how long.
You can take trasparent acetate, get the piece of art or logo you want to copy behind it, and just draw over it with sharpies. I think it would look super neat on top of that "holo" paper.
I just wish I had more of a cyberpunk table. It doesn't go very well with what I have so far. But I'll try something just for the hell of it.
Just be sure to get the right transparency sheets for your printer. They make them for laserprinters AND inkjets, but there is a difference in the way each behaves (the laser ones, naturally, are designed to take a higher temperature, because of the way the printer head fuses toner to the surface; but they won't work in an inkjet - the ink will just bead on the surface and wipe off. The inkjet ones are slightly 'frosted' on the print side so as to better catch and hold the ink, but will melt in a laserprinter and you run the risk of it gumming up the worky bits with molten acetate). Many instant print places can remove the hassle and just copy onto acetate for you, though. Just ask for "copied onto transparency".
