Scratchbuilt Medieval house

In recent weeks I've been playing with scratch building some buildings, based on free paper designs.  The process went somewhat freestyle along the way, which has been fun if time consuming - and probably true to the spirit of civil engineering in the period too! 

Reminiscent of the old Warhammer fantasy building templates that White Dwarf published back in the day, I started with this paper model as my design:

  

Which came free from here: https://mojobob.com/roleplay/props/buildings.html

Using that, exaggerating a few curves here and there for flavour, I decided to add a matching but smaller side structure (kitchens and servants rooms?) to make it more interesting both visually and for gaming with.

The roof base is artists' paper, wetted down and shaped (carefully) to get the sagging appearance. By itself though it is a bit uniform as you can see.  That wasn't the look I was after  

So I added some internal roof framing (visible in the following pics) and reshaped the artists paper around it to get add a wavy look. Trusting that the shingles would (hopefully) hide the bleak edges, I pushed on!

Yes, the roof is indeed made of individual shingles, each clipped from coffee stirrers and glued by hand. Maddening work but the results are worth it (and I just glue away while listening to Audible). It was at this point I decided to make the roof more characterful by using even smaller tiles and placing then in more uneven rows. This added build time but adds to the character of the building.

Finally I was done with the shingles and got started with the walls. Yes, even MORE coffee stirrers gave their lives for our hobby!

Again it was a bit of 2 steps forward and 1 backwards as I adjusted the angles and many were glued down only to be pulled of the next day to be flipped and re-glued.  Looks much better for it though as it was a bit too symmetrical initially.  I should also have distressed those more fulsomely before sticking them on but, to be honest I was excited to be doing something other than glueing shingles on!

And to complete the build I scratch built some doors and shuttered windows before filling the walls with a mixture of spackle, PVA and water. 

Which shows significant evolution from the original paper model design I started with as a template!

Not perfect but certainly good enough so that's the build completed, all proudly done with scrap and bits I had to hand. I might leave the painting to another time - upcoming AHPC maybe :-)

June Hobby Wrap Up

Another month, another busy month including more work travel overseas and time at sea. We did (predictably) succumb to Warhammer 10th edition, but managed to grab somebody's spare book and cards rather than get the new boxed set. Proud of myself!

The very next day we delved into our first game of this edition, and my first game with my Black Templar army. I faced off against Reilly and his new Daemon force. The latter was fun and very different to other armies we've tried, and it was great to finally get my Templars onto the table after building them up this year

The Marshall leads his Crusade onto the field of Vengeance

Bastion of Strength

The Emperor's Champion mets out His Justice

We had a really good time, encouraged by the streamlining of the rules - overall, we found 10th to be an intuitive iteration of the rules rather than a full revolution of the system. Lots of inspiration to paint more Templars, and not just obsess over Turnips. Obviously that will happen too though...

AHPC XII: Stalingrad Apartment Complex

28mm Soldat shown for scale

This 28mm scaled apartment complex building occupies a 1 foot square tile and has 5 seperate (and detachable) floors. It was 3d printed* in small sections by Alan on his filament printer last year, after which I then spent some 30 odd hours glueing, chopping and drilling to give it that pristine Urban Combat look. Quite a labour of love in which I took my own modicum of injuries!

WIP build pics here: http://tasmancave.blogspot.com/2021/10/october-hobby-roundup-terraintober.html

 Each floor was modified to make it is quickly removable to allow whole skirmish games to be played just in this building alone.

The building breaks down into five separate floors - I added framing to the underside of each so that it doesn't inadvertently revert to this state mid-game...

I wanted a balance of dioramic destruction vs playability, so tried to portray a holdout building in which defenders have cleared the worst of the rubble to keep their fighting positions effective. It took quite a bit of time to do this sensibly (and of course with obligatory research of actual Stalingrad buildings - Alan's high standards require nothing less than primary source evidence, which makes one really lift one's game!). All this took well over a month so I then quietly packed it away so I could enjoy painting it during the Challenge

Undercoated in black, I then got my airbrush into action (with coaching assistance - thanks Marty!) to finally start adding pigment to the project. I really wanted to bring some colour to the table amongst all the usual urban grey wreckage, so went with a timeless brick red vibe with some coloured internal walls. I added floorboard beams and other detritus from scrap balsa. Final layers on the brickwork were traditional drybrush method, while internal floors and walls were stippled to give a bedraggled look.

Junkers-eye view of the building

Overall, this construct netted me 140 points for the painting challenge. 

https://thepaintingchallenge.blogspot.com/2022/01/from-paulog-stalingrad-apartment.html

* commercial stl files by WOW Buildings, here: https://wowbuildings.net/

Hail Hydra! (Red Skull was my AHPC VII Character bonus round submission :-)

October Hobby Roundup (Terraintober)

Having achieved my Orctober goal early with my Kill Team (by cheating of course, its Orkier that way), I shifted focus to Terraintober.  My main project has been this 28mm Apartment building by WOW Buildings that Alan printed for me. At 5 levels high its been a labour of love, and takes up a 1 foot square mdf base (I'm hoping to incorporate it into my Secret Weapon urban tiles layout)

The build has consumed about 30 hrs of modelling time post print thus far, trying to balance playability and diorama  - lots of battle damage with drill and dremel plus the rubbling inside that aims to give detail without impacting figure placement.

I'm aiming to sandbag some of the windows to give it a fortified building look, and then I'll call it ready for painting. I'm about to move house again so I'm thinking this might be a good project to paint up during the upcoming Analogue Painting Challenge.

The other terrain project this month was this small Greek Temple by Sarissa, which my daughter built with me for my Mortal Gods table. 

Nice little model that is very thematic without looking like the Temple of Hephaestus is on every battlefield. I'm looking forward to getting onto the table.

1st steps into 3d printing

Pretty chuffed with this - a week to go from liquid resin to finished

This month we started our first foray into 3d printing with our new resin printer (I was a lucky boy for my birthday!).  Amongst other test bits, we printed this piece of terrain which I have now finished painting, thanks to another round of COVID quarantine. TBH I'm rather thrilled with how its turned out, and this was the journey to get there.

Raw printed

adding basing materials

Basecoated

Then washes, highlights and detailing to get to the finished product:

Urban Terrain Table - completd!

Upon scheduling a game of 40k this week, I decided enough was enough and that they were going to be done to a playing standard. In the end it took just 2 days to complete the 32 tiles and finish an 8 x 4 board which we played on today. As always it was much simpler in practice than from overthinking it.

One of my WIP test pics

Earlier this year I bought a second hand set of the Secret Weapon Damaged Urban Tiles set- unpainted and very nice - also sadly OOP now (their website states that the manufacturer stole their moulds!). the 16 1 foot square tiles build a very nice 4 x 4 table - not quite big enough, so I put them to one side before finding another set a few months later. I had Ideas for them but as you know, perfect is the enemy of good enough and so nothing happened.

Upon scheduling a game of 40k this week, I decided enough was enough and that they were going to be done to a playing standard. In the end it took just 2 days to complete the 32 tiles and finish an 8 x 4 board which we played on today- much simpler in practice than through overthinking it.

Spray painted - generic grey, with a flat black on the roadways. Just cheap spray primer from the hardware store.

Base coated with a stippling and heavy drybrushing techniques. Reilly helped me and we got all of this done in about 5 hours.  We used sample paint pots: British Paints "Knowledge" for the roads and XXX for the tiles. This deliberately kept the whole board fairly bright, but also unsaturated in colour so that miniatures and building will really pop.

Even at this stage the initial test look was pretty satisfying.

Then we did a few washes and highlights, added some ocre colours into a few muddy shell holes for colours, and silvered up the manhole covers, drainage grills.

While at it, I did some scatter terrain in the same colours to match

And thus we were away today with some friends and had a lot of fun on a great looking table.

I quite like how they are period generic and genre agnostic - no skulls etc so they are as applicable for Stalingrad or Berlin in WW2, as they are for the Defence of Cadia in the Grimdark future.  I'd like to find a few of the undamaged tiles to give me a few more options and some larger, flat areas for key terrain. Overall though, a great project to do (and complete) in just a few days.