Yes, it's a dumpster

Although I have a ton of basing stuff, I don't have much in the way of scenery (except for oil drums). I've seen this dumpster on Reaper's site and at Brookhurst Hobbies and in November I finally gave in to the voices and bought it. The ongoing apocalyptic lockdown has given me time to (at least attempt to) catch up on some of the Magical Box of Unloved Lead's contents, and why not spend a warm spring afternoon painting a dumpster?

As I don't own any spray paint or an airbrush and have lost misplaced my sandpaper, I had a happy fun time brushing white primer all over smooth plastic. To get this effect at home, try brushing skimmed milk over a bathroom tile. Three coats of primer later I was ready to slap on a coat of Vallejo Neutral Grey.

Once that had dried I drybrushed some Army Painter Uniform Grey and then set about doing the weathering effects. I recently treated myself to the Vallejo Special Effects paint set and it is superb. Along with colours like Dead White and Vomit, you also get Dry Rust and Rust. Using a bit of sponge and a couple of reference pics found on the interwebs I daubed Dry Rust, the darker colour, over where the dumpster would be bashed about. After that it was a case of using an old size 0 brush to stipple on the orange Rust colour.

The lid is Vallejo Dark Grey washed over with Black Wash and then highlighted with more Dark Grey. I debated added some white splats to represent bird poo, and I still might.

The little graffiti thingies are from these transfers, of which I've bought about 10 sheets. They're great but suffer from two flaws: they're almost transparent, and there's no white in them. So if you put them on, say, a neutral grey dumpster, they look crap compared to how they look on their white backing sheet. I swiped on some thinned down Vallejo Off-White to give them a lighter background, and it helped. The poster is from a set of scaled printable ones I found online.

The brush marks are from the matt varnish I use to protect the paint. This is the first time that the varnish has streaked like this and I have no idea why. I didn't do the rest of the model and really should have painted over the streaks.

A tribute to a great album and the most useless prime minister in British history in one convenient poster? Yes please! This is another printable scaled poster. I've ordered another two more dumpsters and can't wait to paint it them.