Hi, I’m buiding a 1/87 scale diorama with a large, shopping mall-style parking lot (68" x 22").
I’m having difficulty figuring out what material to use for the asphalt. sandpaper sheets are too small and therefor require too much splicing, plaster is too brittle for such a large area, and cement is so heavy.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks.
-Josh
railroad hobbyshops have sheets just for the roads.
A mixture of course sand, white glue, and black food coloring. Mix into a sticky paste, apply as a thin layer allow to dry. Touch up as needed, paint your parking lot lines…done?
Mix the glue and food coloring first. You’ll probably need to a a bit more to the sand glue mix once combined. I did this once long ago and it worked fairly well, but we were trying to make shapes from it not flat asphalt.
For 1/87th, I would consider using one of those textured spray paints. I would cover the area with a light coating of a glue to provide an typical non flat surface (like most parking lots). Once contours are good and dried, I would give the lot a light spray of the textured paint. Since a paved parking lot of that scale would not have a lot of huge texture, I would lightly roll over the damp paint with one of those rubbery rollers they use for scrap booking to kind of flatten out the texture. After that, should be good to paint gray-black (if you didn’t use that color spray), lightly dry brush to bring out the texture and paint on the stripes. Just be sure to be consistent with most parking lots and keep your spaces about 3 feet too narrow for cars to fit (or mark all but the three farthest from the store ‘Compact’ [;)].
I’ve seen some pretty convincing asphalt in that scale achieved by painting the surface w/ a sponge rather than a brush/airbrush. Using subtly different colors and building up the paint seems to work well.
Another technique from DaveintheHat is to use plaster tinted with black which gives the right scale texture and colour when it dries.