Cheap Kit, Big Building - Modeling an N Scale Graffiti-Covered Plaza Through A Creative Lens

an unbelievable site in downtown Los Angeles what do you feel when you see tagers going to town on a 53 story highrise in Downtown [Music] [Music] LA in early 2024 downtown LA captured the attention of the world as graffiti artists adorned the windows of the oceanwide plaza skyscrapers these abandoned Towers vacant for 3 years due to financial troubles became canvases for massive tags sparking widespread interest and huge media coverage as the towers gained media exposure my friends embarked on their own apartment style graffiti projects one based on the oceanwide Plaza and the other inspired by a Miami office tower turned into a towering art project during the art basil week inspired by my friends I wanted to create my own large- scale building but I wanted to do so in an affordable manner I noticed that one of oceanwide Plaza's architectural features resembled a detail on one of my Outland model kits that I own I had two of these kits on hand and they were worth about $10 so I decided to combine their parts to create two large apartment complexes one three-dimensional and the other one serving as a backdrop building the ultimate goal was to attempt to add graffiti over the balcony Windows just like the oceanwide [Music] Plaza [Music] so I have two buildings there is the principal building which is three-dimensional and there is the flat which is a two-dimensional building after I painted the window Mion I've gone in and I have given this a fairly light weathering um I did a little bit of staining around the windows with acrylic paint and then I gave the entire structure um a coat of rubbing alcohol in India ink wash and let it just run down the face to create sort of the streaking The Next Step will be to insert the window glazing I'm going to put acetate sheets behind all of the openings and then I'm actually going to give it a coat of black spray paint from behind so that you can't see through them and then once that is dry I'm going to start adding the individual stencils taping them in place and start spray painting over top each of the windows the glazing and the Mullens before I start airbrushing graffiti onto the actual buildings I wanted to do a bit of a test run to see how far I could take a stencil and how many variants of that stencil I could create I've airbrushed graffiti stencils before and I needed to layer slightly different stencils to get desired effect but in this case because I need to do about 50 or 60 unique graffitis I wanted to discover what the most efficient way to do this would be so one of the stencils I created is based on graffiti on the tower hours in LA and I cut it out with my laser cutter and this is about 5 or 6 scale feet tall so the first version of this was white on top of this somewhat concrete background and that was the first example in the second example I painted the stencil with blue removed it and then feathered the edges out to create a glowing Edge put the stencil back on and filled it in with white in the third example I did very much like the second example I filled in the stencil with a pinky color removed the stencil expanded the edges put the stencil back on and then I did two colors to create a gradient across the stencil face went from yellow to White in the fourth example I first laid down some black using the stencil and then I offset the stencil a little bit applied white to create this drop shadow and in the final example I used a very light blue to create a glow effect without using the stencil I put the stencil down filled it with a darker blue removed the stencil offset it and then put a gradient between pink and white so the next step I'm going to go with a fairly fine pen and Edge along each of the letters to Define them better and then I may go in with a white pen as well to highlight those edges I don't like the way the line Looks um so I try to line as finely as I can with these acrylic paint pens and then I come back in and try to touch it up with the white this is probably quite passable but I'm not happy with how this [Music] looks I am much happier with how these turned out I went back over these three filled them back in and then I've gone back with a much lighter touch with the pen not trying to outline any of the letters and just get the exterior outlined and I think these look great I think I'm ready to start adding the graffiti to the [Music] building [Music] [Music] I have airbrushed to about 60 different stencils onto the building between the backdrop building and the three-dimensional building including some graffiti along the sidewalks I'm generally really happy with how this turned out however I will say that the window mions are very deep and so while things look fairly good face on when you you get down at an oblique angle you can see that they're very deep and they add a shadow and makes it a little bit confusing to read if I was to do this again I would probably take a different approach for how I did the windows but for the time being I think from afar this looks pretty impressive so the next step will be to go in and use the marker pens to help to find the letter forms and some of the edges I did a quick test on this particular window and I think this is looking very good so I'm excited to actually work on this and see how it turns [Music] [Music] out [Music] [Music] so the graffiti is now complete and the balconies are all attached if I was to do this again I would change the design of the balconies they obscure each of the windows a little too much and it makes it hard to see as well as they all cast Shadows so when they're underneath top lighting the colors are not quite so vivid you don't see them as well and it's regrettable because I'm hiding an awful lot of work so the last step is a bit of weathering and a few little details and I get to put it on the [Music] layout [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]