The real beauty of building miniature stuff is that you can just keep adding things until they work. It’s real Bob Ross “happy accidents” shit.
I started with some 1/2″ insulation foam cut into roughly square and rectangular shapes, as close to right angles and 1/2″ increments of length as I could manage. Used PVA glue to stick ’em together, plus some usefully-sized wooden beads from the dollar store, to get a shape over which I could hang a tarp. No need to texture or paint!
For the tarps, I used BMC’s recipe for dried-out wet wipes plus PVA, water, and paint. I didn’t use quite enough paint, so the tarps were paler than I thought was realistic, and I found that the PVA would happily pool in the lower sections where shadows ought to dwell, giving a soft white sort of glow effect. Since I didn’t want glowing crates, I tried spraying the tarps down with water and a bit of alcohol, and then pouring homemade wash over top. That helped a lot, but I still had disconcerting white patches.
Enter mister airbrush and some black primer, to get into almost every crevice for some nice soft shadows. The result was some stained, worn-looking tarps which I’m quite pleased with and which should work for nearly any setting I play; fantasy, SF, cyberpunk, grimdark, etc. I plan to do some actual-pretty containers for SF and fantasy in the near future, and use cheesecloth as cargo netting, but for now I’ve got cover and line of sigh blockers!
