Ever want your urban terrain to stand apart from everyone else’s?

An easy way is to draw in ballpoint pen in reverse on an eraser. Put as much ink on as you can, then press it onto a wall, piece of ground, etc. It will end up looking like a half worn away piece of graffiti. Excellent for single words or graffiti style writing.

This is the simplest and you can always try metallic ink pens as well.

Another way to spice up your models is to add posters. Don’t have a laser printer? It’s easy. Find a suitable sized image from a magazine. Cut it out. Now using some very fine sandpaper/very fine emery board, lightly sand down the the back of the paper. This is to thin down the paper so it sticks down better and conforms to the shape of the piece you are gluing it to. You can also sand the edges of the front so it looks worn from being out in the weather for a long time. You can use some watered down PVA glue to get the paper to conform to any texture underneath and wipe away any excess glue. As the glue dries shiny, you may want to give it a quick coat of matt varnish after the glue has totally dried.

For repeated designs, a stencil is the easiest option. Just a bit of card with the shape cut out that you can use to mask an area as you use the mask to drybush the area.

If you want to add advertising posters made from boxes (candy chocolate gum and so on) it is the same as for cutting out the magazine images. Simply cut the box to shape, and sand down the back and sides, then you can add that to a wall, or if you want it to be a bit more special, you can add a trim made from mathcsticks or similar. Painted black and highlighted grey. For billboard style posters, cut out your image, fold it up in one way, then in the reverse, so then when you give it am light sand, the edges of the folds are high enough to be sanded as well. (you could probably do this whilst it is still folded). When adding it to a building, you can tear out a section so it looks like it has fallen away from the wall as most large format posters are done in smaller sections placed together to make up a larger poster. This helps the illusion of the billboard surrounding, possibly adding some little pieces that look like lights to illuminate the billboard would help this too.

Other methods of ink stamping or paint stamping involve cutting a design out of a potato, but these are pretty rough and are more suited for stamping things that look like icons and symbols daubed on the ground/building.