Grounds of Grunge

I've already uploaded a set of grunge-stained wallpapers for those of you who own World Adventures and have no patience for creating your own (and to those of you who don't, I'm really sorry - but there is nothing in the base game that will support this type of paper yet).  The set will be a freebie and I made it because I know people who have zero patience with the Create A Style tool (and I happen to live with one of them!) and these will just add themselves to your game, premade, as a complete set of stained brick papers.  Hope you have fun with them!

But what is the point of nasty walls when they're surrounded by an English country garden?!  Quite.  So I have been busy compiling two sets of grungetastic terrain paints!  The first set will be the Cement Garden set - full of industrial-strength grit and grunge, and the second set will be the Derelict Garden for dead grass, overgrown cobble and cracked dry earth.  A few old favourites (of mine - you might have hated them) have stepped over from my Sims 2 collections (stained cement, littered rubble, black asphalt and some grass with mud patches) but the majority of the paints are brand new...

And in making them, I belatedly discovered the entire point of the square brush!  See my paving slabs with the weed in between?  Incredibly simple to do: plonk down a yard full of base-game weed, then take the smallest square brush, move the slider right to the end of 'hard edge' and dab cement slabs down.  The square brush on 'hard edge' setting still doesn't reach quite to the very edge of the tile, and this makes it easily possible to leave unpainted (ie weed gaps) between the slabs.  How cool is that?! 

But you probably already knew all this.  In fact, your first-ever Sims 3 house probably used this very technique.  Indeed, you probably did it all the way through Sims 2 as well, and so did your 3-year-old nephew, pet cat etc etc.  All I can say to that is that I was probably busy making cranes or something...