Micro Art Studio - District 5 L apartment with pavement

Todays entry to my crafting blog is the beautiful District 5 L apartment from Micro Art Studio. My goal here is to start working on a board for Infinity and I just love the look of the MAS buildings. I also added in the footpath to complete the look.

As I'm not lucky enough to have an airbrush, unlike it seems everyone out there who has built this scenery before me, I decided for a bit more of a risky approach.



After cutting out the elements, I used a citadel purity seal to varnish the model. Someone suggested that this would be a good approach to stop the paint soaking in and it worked wonderfully. Other posters had talked about hairspray and a number of other options, but this was what I had and I'm happy with it. Next up I spray some GW black which went on in one layer without issues.

While out in one of our local hobby stores I picked up some 150ml Humbrol acrylic sprays with a dark grey and a light grey. I then used these to get a bit of a layer effect to the elements. For the roof I found a gradient from dark to light, outer to in worked well. On reflection more of an extreme might have worked better. For the footpaths I did something similar and afterwards realised that largely the positioning didn't seem to matter as long as there was some form of gradient.

For the building elements I went dark at the bottom and light at the top. With the combined elements one over the other this gave some good points of contrast and I'm pretty happy with it.

The inside I did in an off white cream, cos you know, that's what you paint the insides of houses.

Cutting the elements out was fine. The connector points are easy to see and I took my time with a sharb blade. For the most part putting the building together was grand but I did make two crucial mistakes.

1) I didn't realise how tight I should have had the corners. Next time, and there will be a next time, I'll be trimming the sockets to make sure the fit is very tight. This error in judgement wasn't really noticeable at the start but near the end when the multiple joint gabs added up it did cause problems. Luckily nothing that couldn't be helped with a bit of filing and work.

These should connect square

Gap between the corners

2) I ended up connecting the inside of the L last. This was stupid. The instructions to clearly show how to assemble without ending up in this situation. Unfortunately, the poor placement and weird angle meant I couldn't get the connectors in at a reasonable angle and resulted in those sections getting broken. I the end I just jammed them in to hold the model steady regardless. As the elements are hidden away and behind a facade it all worked out fine but this combined with the loose corners really distressed me for a while as I thought I had balls the whole thing up.

Broken connector

Luckily its all worked out fine!

Was shocked to see how much stuff was left over. Not sure what if anything I can do with it.
I do especially love the benches and planters that came with the footpaths. All in all very happy and looking forward to getting my next building!