Andy's Painting Bureau: God I love the Pound Shop

We all have them, be them £1 shops, $1 Stores or €1 markets, and they are a fantastic source of bits of rubbish for our gaming minds, a positive gold mine of crap.

Well the one good side of my office move (will I ever stop moaning about it) is that I now have very good access to not one but two of the different British £1 chains, PoundLand and PoundWorld, as well as that other fantastic source of gaming junk - Wilkos, in fact the only one missing is the slightly undercutting 99p Store. So I was perusing the aisles the other day to get a sieve and some plastic boxes (more of that later) when I stumbled upon everyone's favourite South East Asian god like statue - Buddha.

Now I've been looking for a Thai style Buddha that would scale as a large statue with 1/72 for quite some time and not wanting to spend more than perhaps £5, in fact I nearly bought one whilst on holiday for about €4 (which these days is pretty much the same as £4 - thanks Brexit) but it was a bit on the small side and I would have had to explain it to SWMBO and I really couldn't be arsed with that so didn't bother. Now these £1 finds are a good size standing at about 5" and came in four poses, but only two really fitted my minds eye image.

The plan is to build a kind of temple which will be draped with vines and vegetation to look like some lost jungle shrine in Burma or the like. I might even gently break one of them to make it seem like the ravages of time have done their worst.

First job, hit them with a blast of undercoat and think about how I'll finish them off to look like old stone.

Looking more stone like already

Now I wonder if this stuff would work and give me the effect I want. But considering this is a bit of a budget project shelling out £7.99 on a can of spray which may well be a disaster seems a stretch.

It may well take me several years to get around to doing this, god knows it's taken more than a few to actually buy the bloody statues, but at least I've made a start.

So with these clasped in my sweaty little mitts it was off to the kitchen zone to pick up a sieve and some of those plastic take away boxes, all for just a pound a piece (apart from the take away boxes where you get 8 for your £1).

I know this seems a bit of an odd purchase, especially the smaller tea strainer sieve (which actually had to come from Amazon as an add-on order), but I have a large bag of sharp sand from a building project some time ago and it's quite good for sprinkling on the bases of my desert buildings I discovered the other week. but some of it is a bit course for the effect I want. So...

Sieve the stuff into different grades and store it ready for use. Should make my life a little easier.

And on a related note to that, one of the stops on our holidays this year was a visit to the volcanic island of La Palma in the Canary Islands which has black sand beaches.