Reaper Miniatues - Shipping Container - Prep

I know, I'm in the midst of a lot of other projects but there is a little contest on the Reaper forums that caught my eye. With the last container on the water (hopefully) that contains the rest of the BONES 3 Kickstarter the forumites thought it would be fun to have a little unofficial contest. By early March paint up and post on the forum your version of the shipping container that was part of the BONES 2 release. So I acquired the Reaper shipping container and managed to get started on this little side project last night.

I cleaned the plastic, scrubbed it down with a toothbrush and dishsoap to make sure there wasn't any residue left on the two pieces before I started to work on it.

I glued that bottom to the rest of the model and that pretty much finished up the assembly portion of the evening. I then pulled out the airbrush and applied a coat of Reaper's Brown Liner from their Master Series Paint Line. For whatever reason the Liners seem to work very well as a primer for the BONES line of miniatures. I'm not sure it was necessary in this case as this seems to be a different kind of plastic from the regular BONES line. But I needed to prime it and I had it on hand.

Thinking ahead to the weathering steps I decided to apply a rust color as the base coat. This will allow me to really go to town on the rust effects as I move forward with the project. I'm going to do some rust work before the graffiti portion since very often the surfaces chosen by the graffiti artist are already worn and rusted by the elements.

It looks like styrene plastic but it doesn't feel like it. So it got a bath so I wouldn't have problems later.

Brown Liner applied as a primer. Not the best job, my airbrush was in the process of clogging up on the paint. I have already grown accustomed to using the AMMO paints in my airbrush!

AMMO Red Brown Shadow applied as a base coat for the weathering steps that will come a bit later.