Kowloon walled City Miniature Part 3: Printing and painting

Hey, it's been awhile! With work and personal tasks I haven't had much time to work on the blog as much, but I have been keeping busy in the meantime. Taking the time to focus on this project and to bring to life the vision I had for the Buildings of Kowloon was a retrospective one, it taught me to slow down and look at the finer details, keep long term goals in mind, and trust myself to see things through even when there are external forces working against it.

In the previous post I went over the use of greeble kits and how building test prints were created. In this post I will be explaining the printing of the buildings, how the prints were planned out and tracked, then the paint process and finally other details including general planning etc.

Gearing up to print the buildings
This task was going to be tedious since at the time I only had one printer, using the CR-10 I had a good idea on what the settings were going to be since I printed some test pieces out earlier. My plan was to keep up with printing atleast one piece a day for the main buildings and for the smaller pieces batch print them in 2-3 building groups. I'd let the printer run overnight on weekdays and during the day on weekends. This was optimal for my schedule since I had to head out and run errands/ meet up with friends. This also taught me how to multitask in ways that didn't drain my personal and creative energy.

Keeping track of printed parts
The way I kept track of all the printed pieces was to create a naming system that used a primary and secondary identifier for each of the pieces, breaking up the city into 6 quadrants then assigning secondary identifiers to the buildings (ie; Q2_Block_5, Q2 = Primary identifier _Block5 = Secondary identifier).

Putting a name to these buildings kept track of each print and drastically reduce double prints, spreadsheets were used as another method for keeping track of each model by adding status dropdowns and adjusting as each print was completed.

My favorite part about this project was to slowly see the blocks coming together one by one, seeing this kept me motivated and my imagination racing, picturing how the final result would look one day.

Painting processes:
During the early printing days I've printed a few test models, a few of them being double prints this was useful to test out some early ideas, some days on my freetime I would run the printer in the background and work on test paints in the meantime.

My process for the buildings started with painting all of the prints black with a vallejo primer and then 2 full passes of dry brushing with a vallejo white primer, then afterwards I used a paint wash to get the final grungy look of the buildings. it took some time but I went through and finally finished all of them totaling 70 buildings.

Grouped buildings

Some dry brushed buildings ready for a second coat

In previous blog:

Read more about the process here: https://www.vertexpolyfort.com/blog/kowloon-walled-city-miniature-part-2-test-prints-and-greeble-detailing

Keeping track of painted parts:

Once I found the look I wanted, I kept notes on how to reproduce this for the rest. I had a small work area where I would keep the model in groups depending how far along the process it was, for example groups with just the base primer, groups with the first or second pass, then the finished groups.

Map Planning and goals for the final result:

My goals for this project was to have this city mounted on a frame and then also have a separate frame with just the map. Wrapping up a project of any kind can be daunting but having a roadmap/plan can ease the worries of a distant goal. I hope to have more to share on the last blog post of this project but for now I'm only able to share what I have so far for the map. I set a goal for myself this 2024 to draw more often and with the use of illustrator programs I'm putting that goal to work! Here’s what I have for the map so far, very simple but still a WIP.

Thanks for checking this out and if your curious about the past two blogs heres the links to then here!