A quick pair of photos of the small Russian church I’m building for Russian Civil War gaming in 28mm. Earlier in January I discussed some planning and thoughts I had for a wargame-scale small church, and while it isn’t going as fast as I had hoped progress is being made!
My work-in-progress Russian church, alongside the two earlier Russian huts.
As with the huts, the basic structure is mattboard with coffee stirsticks providing the woodwork.
A slightly more recent work-in-progress shot. Shingle roofs are slow going…
The roofs of the church are going to be shingled rather than thatched, and while doing shingles with built-up strips looks good, it is frankly tedious… The smaller roof is done except for trim, though, and the main roof is about half done, then it’s on to the domes to provide that very Russian look that’s so distinctive.
It’s been a bit of a slow ten days or so on the wargaming front around here; I wish I could say there was a proper reason, but I just haven’t spent much time at the workbench. One of those weeks.
Regardless, earlier this month I did finish bothsmall Russian huts/farmhouses that I started over Christmas, and the Russian church is coming along nicely.
Here they are together, with a pair of Brigade Games’ 28mm White Russian officers for scale. The walls are mattboard and wood from coffee stirsticks, the roofs are towel with cardboard structure underneath.
The fronts of a pair of Russian rural buildings – huts, small barns, possibly small farmhouses.
The smaller one on the left is 3″x2″ and roughly 2″tall, the slightly larger one on the right is 4″x2″and about 3″ tall.
Removable thatch roofs from towel.
The hipped roofs are mattboard and light card underneath with towel soaked in diluted white glue as the thatch.
The roofs removed, showing their structure slightly.
Here you can see the roofs removed and flipped over. The structure of the roofs is all just cardboard and I’ve had no warping at all despite the towel for thatch being fairly liberally soaked in diluted white glue after it’s glued down.
Both buildings got a basecoat of black paint mixed with white glue (my standard scenery basecoat), the woodwork was drybrushed with a grey mixed with some tan followed by a second drybrush of paler grey. The thatch got the same black/white glue base then a couple of drybrushings with various brown/tan/grey mixes. The towel soaks up paint and glue as well as you expect towel to, even during drybrushing — expect to go through paint like crazy.
I have vague plans for a couple more buildings for a Russian hamlet, maybe something in whitewashed plaster more suited to the southern portions of the country, and of course the Russian church is nicely underway. More about that tomorrow!
I don’t usually like to talk about plans and ideas before there’s at least some progress to show off, but while I was away over the New Year I had time to do some quick sketching and thinking about a building that would be at the centre of any Russian village or hamlet during the Russian Civil War, and which really is iconic when you want to remind players the game is, in fact, set in Russia.
Some pages from my notebook – possible plans for a feature building for my RCW table!
Google Image Search is really indispensable when looking for prototypes and inspiration, although it’s very easy to get a building that’s just too big for the table. The church at top left would have been over 8″ long and 4 wide, far too big for a scenery piece that is basically just a Line of Sight blocker. The design shrank from there (top right page) then grew slightly on the bottom page and I’m fairly confident the finished result will be something like the two-part double-dome design on those pages, with a footprint roughly 5″x3″ and an overall height somewhere around 6″.
I saved this image from the web but forgot to write down where I found it or any details of the actual building, but it’s become my main reference. I also can’t currently find this picture again via GIS…anyway, it’s a perfect-sized building for my purposes and should help me get a lot of details right.
Russian Church found via Google Image Search, except I didn’t save any info on where I found the image… sorry.
Started another Russian farmhouse on Boxing Day evening, this one slightly bigger than the first at 4″x2″.
I mentioned in the previous article that I used coffee stir sticks for the wood siding. The workbench photo below should explain some of how I’ve been doing these buildings.
Two WiP photos of Russian huts. See text for details, click for full size.
Basically, I split stir sticks lengthwise, then glue them along mattboard walls I’ve already cut the doors and windows out of. It’s easier to go back afterward and cut the stir sticks out of the openings than it is to premeasure! You can see one long side already trimmed above, and the other three sides waiting for trimming.
Incidentally, for this kind of trimming, I highly recommend an X-Acto #17 chisel blade instead of the classic scalpel blade (the #11 blade). Being able to cut straight down makes clean cuts in the windows easier, and it’s an easy way to trim thin wood and other strip materials.
The second photo of the pair above shows the new house with the walls assembled but no trim addded yet, and the first hut finished, except for the roof which is drying off-camera.
I’ve already assembled the thatch roof for the new building, and didn’t get any WiP photos of that, but I”ll try to get some progress photos of the next thatch roof I make, I promise. It is kind of difficult to smear glue everywhere and handle a camera, though…
Off for a week tomorrow, so see you all next year!
… and over at my place, I was hiding out, enjoying the last evening of solitary, productive peace and quiet I”ll have for a while, as the holiday season proper lands on us tomorrow.
In between beer, sending out festive email, and a little bit of painting on some White Russian troops, I cranked out this: A very small hut is investigated by a pair of Brigade Games 28mm Russian officers.
It’s tiny, only 2″ x 3″ – but I’ve always liked the philosophy of making your buildings a bit smaller but having more of them. A hamlet of four or six buildings looks more convincing as a hamlet than a pair of buildings taking up the same space on the wargaming table.
Construction is almost all mattboard, with the siding created from thin wooden coffee stir sticks split lengthwise. The roof is towel over a mattboard framework, and removable. There’s a door to glue into place as well.
The roof needs a lot more painting, which it might get on Boxing Day or else in the New Year, but I’m fairly happy with the greyish tone of the walls at this point. I might wind up rebuilding the roof, as I got a bit too enthusiastic with the scissors and haven’t left much in the way of eves over the walls. The simplest fix for that might just be to slap another layer of towel down over the existing one.
This little building was mostly a test of the wood siding idea, and of building the hipped roofs so typical of rural buildings in early 20th C Russia (and elsewhere, of course). They’re fussier, but this one works and so does the woodwork, so the new year should see a nice little Russian hamlet taking shape here.
Hope everyone has an excellent holiday season, however you celebrate it, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and such!
Here’s something I bought largely on a whim from a local craft store that has proven unexpectedly useful. It’s a 2oz (60ml) sprayer, cost about $2, and I find all sorts of uses for it.
Filled (as it is here) with a dilute mixture of acrylic artists ink and water, it’s a highly controllable way of applying washes or stains to scenery projects. In this case it’s got a grungy-looking mix of green and brown inks in it as part of an ongoing experiment in making grassy fields from fake fur (more on the fake fur experiments in a future post!). Due to lack of bench space, I often put projects on an old plastic tray and work on them there; I can spray with this little sprayer without having overspray all over the tray and the table I’m working on.
When basing figures or adding texture to scenery, I’ll put sand or flock down, paint it if required, then once that’s all dry, do a second coat of heavily diluted white glue to really lock the scenery material in place. To get the glue to flow easily into and around the scenery material, I fill the sprayer with plain water with just a tiny dab of dish soap added. The soap destroys any surface tension in the water, making what’s known as “wet water”.
A quick spray of wet water gets a second coat of dilute white glue applied by eyedropper to flow nicely in and around the scenery material. Once it’s dry the flock/sand/whatever is pretty nearly bombproof. I’ve got figure bases a decade old done this way that still haven’t shed a noticable amount of flock.
You could probably spray dilute white glue directly with a sprayer like this, but it might also be a great way to clog the nozzle, and especially when basing figures, I don’t exactly want glue sprayed on them.
Got a favourite small or slightly odd tool? Share in the comments!
Picked up a cheap towel to use as thatching. Here it is in a quickie late-night photograph, glue still wet on the roof of the half-timber barn.
Towel strips as thatch on the half-timber barn. As usual, click for full size.
The roof has a base of sheet styrene. I used white glue to stick the towel strips down, then more thinned white glue to soak the towel, which (when it eventually dries!) should solidify it nicely.
The barn has also been given a base of mattboard and mostly primed. My usual scenery primer is a 1:1 mix of white glue and black paint, mixed right on the model. It seals and protects the scenery surface nicely, even fairly fragile stuff like styrofoam toughens up a bit!
The main arched doors are also in progress, but I forgot to get a photo of them.
Still to-do for the roof, trim the edges and glue them under the eves for a more finished look, then paint and more paint. I also need to do basswood rafters under the roof, both for looks and for actual structural support, as the roof will still be removable when this building is finished.
The roof still looks a bit too towel-like right now, hopefully finishing the edges and painting will sort that!
Something for the English Civil War/Thirty Years War table, as well as for pulp games set in the quainter parts of the UK or Europe! All those crops gathered from my fields have to be stored somewhere, after all.
A stone-and-halftimber barn, work in progress. Click, as usual, for larger.
The whole thing is highly inspired by Warlord Game’s rather nice 16th Century Barn. Actually, scrub “highly inspired”, I’m outright copying the building, as a learning piece! Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, isn’t it?
The basic structure is foamcore. The stonework is soft foam salvaged from a takeout food container; I’m going to have to swing by our local (awesome) plastic supplier to see if they have something similar in sheets, as one takeout container at a time is a rather slow way to accumulate building materials! I scribed/carved the stones with a sharp pencil, and quite like how they’ve turned out.
The timbering is 1/8th x 1/16th inch balsa strip from the Stockpile’o’Doom. I have about six lengths of it, and it is entirely possible it’s leftovers from our family model railroading setup in the early/mid-1990s when I was in junior high. I think I’ve carried that balsa around long enough — time to put it to use, right?
Doors, additional timbering at the corners of the building, and a base are still to do. The inside will get a bit of plastering just for texture, and probably a lot of straw strewn around and such — details to add interest without getting much in the way, ideally.
The roof will be towel thatching over a styrene base.
I’ve heard the suggestion that you try one new-to-you technique per project; I’m afraid this simple-looking building breaks that “rule” good and proper! Foam stonework is new to me; likewise half-timbered building construction, and I’ve never actually used the towel-as-thatch technique before either! Wish me luck!
First scenery project in quite a while, I’ve done lots of figure painting over the winter and spring but no scenery.
I pulled the top layer of paper off a sheet of corrugated cardboard and cut that up for the plowed parts, then used cardboard from an old shoebox for the base layers. There’s 4 6″x4″ fields and 1 larger 8″x6″ field.
The basecoat was a 1:1 mix of white glue and paint; the paint was a mix of two shades of brown, a shot of black and a bit of grey, just for variety. I squirt the glue and paint directly onto each field and mix with a 1.5″ housepainting brush, and transfer some of each field’s rough mix of paint to the other fields, so they’re all mostly the same colour without having to mix paint seperately in a container. The 1:1 paint and glue mix toughens and seals scenery nicely; it’s my usual primer coat for almost all scenery projects.
Paint still wet on two of the 4×6 fields.
After the basecoat was dry (and I’d patched a few bits I missed) I drybrushed with a lighter tan/brown shade, then flocked around the edges and onto some of the fields. The flocking was mostly Woodland Scenics ground foam, the dark green “Weeds” colour, and GW’s brighter green flock, with two other shades of green ground foam thrown in for variety.
Found, buried in my harddrive, another couple of forgotten work-in-progress shots from the first round of shoreline/riverbank construction back in June 2009. The rest of the construction was written up last week.
Bare cardboard stage of construction of the first set of shoreline/riverbank pieces. Click for full size.
Shoreline/riverbank beginning painting. Click for full size.
Muddy brown paint on the banks, first coats of acrylic gloss varnish down on the water. Click for full size.
