Dude City – Le Gaming Dude

This project has been percolating for many a year in my heart as I have always had a fondness for the old West. As far as I can remember, I spent many hours play fighting with friends, dressed as the typical Hollywood cowboys, ridding a mechanical horse and brandishing a wide variety of toy Colts, Winchesters and Bowie knifes. And then there were all these plastic cowboys, outlaws and lawmen (Airfix were my favorite), Sioux and Apaches Indians and cavalrymen, constantly warring over a small wood and carboard Western town and hardboard cavalry fort. This project is the spiritual descendant of my childhood daydreams, Le Gaming Dude Western playground, ‘Dude City’.

The project will probably be developed in 3 parts and in the first part, I decided to focus upon 3D printed buildings.

The first few buildings come from Digital Taxidermy, a 3D file source I ahve used before for SciFi and modern. Find them at https://www.digitaltaxidermy.co.uk/

The hotel is a no frill building that will nicely line the street.

Following the hotel is a two story house, easy to print and paint.

Every wild west town needs and undertaker and this one is very small and easy to paint. I went with a sober grey and light blue scheme.

I close this phase of DT printing with another 2 story building, this one quite interesting and a ;little harder to put together. I added an mdf board for support due to the existence of support columns.

Next, I picked a few Printable Scenery models. I have long loved the quality of their files and you can find them at https://www.printablescenery.com/

One of my oldest #d printed models was this bank, a fruit of my early drive to create Dude City.

I love the Sheriff’s Office and printed/cut and glued a few wanted posters near the door for added flair.

The jail has a fair amount of cracked plaster over the bricks, which I quickly treated with craft white paint and dry brushed white paint, covered with a sepia wash. For bricks painting details, see my MCP project.

The general store is pretty nice, except that it does not seem to have a sign (something I may correct later). I painted the façade green by dry brushing the wood color.

This first street looks pretty nice already.

WARNING: As an afterthought, it appears that the Digital Taxidermy building may be at a different scale than the Printable Scenery buildings (so much for my reading the descriptive files and side notes!). Once I figure it out and moving forward, I will correct the proportions of my printed buildings.