Happy New Year everyone. And now I've got the pleasantries over with I can confirm exclusively that I'll be looking forward/backward with "2020 Vision" this year. Right, where did I put my glasses...
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| On patrol with a BTR70 (QRF) |
Anyway, continuing on from a previous blog post from (wait, what?)
last January, here are a couple of new 15mm-ish buildings for Africa/AK47 which I made in the same sort of style. As I mentioned in the earlier post, I've been to various places in
Africa with work and in rural west Africa houses are usually made of
wood.
The planks used are very wide generally because the trees are big and there are (or were) plenty of them. Consequently, wooden coffee stirrers that can be pilfered widely here are just the right scale to make these sorts of buildings.
In this case I wanted to make a more modern building, still with a thatching grass roof, but with corrugated iron accessories. This was based on a building I saw in Gabon, which now I look at it again had an all corrugated iron roof and the side-planks were vertical not horizontal. No matter: 'tis but artistic licence.
Therefore, construction as noted was mainly from coffee stirrers braced with matches and cardboard. The removable roof was made from bristles cut from an old brush stuck on to more cardboard and the veranda was roofed with bits of corrugated cardboard.
After undercoating inside and out in black, I basically dry-brushed the whole thing in various colours to get the effect I wanted. Dark washes were used around the bottom of walls and in the shadows. I have numerous tester pots of house paint lying about and to be honest they do just as well for this sort of work as anything.
The other building I did was meant to represent a collection of shanty houses. This was made from thin polystyrene sheet (pizza packaging) and then covered in corrugated cardboard.
Again, dry-brushing in various colours was the order of the day, with an emphasis on giving things a rusty wash (I use Revell 37 Reddish Brown for that).
And as usual for the bases I textured these from my tub of coarse shelly sand and added various tufts of long grass in the corners.
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| Our glorious leader arrives in town, taking no chances |
Anyway, that's it for now. I'll have various other cardboard 'n' coffee stirrer construction projects to write about this year and, amazingly, a wargame AAR I've still to recount, so stay tuned.
The planks used are very wide generally because the trees are big and there are (or were) plenty of them. Consequently, wooden coffee stirrers that can be pilfered widely here are just the right scale to make these sorts of buildings.
In this case I wanted to make a more modern building, still with a thatching grass roof, but with corrugated iron accessories. This was based on a building I saw in Gabon, which now I look at it again had an all corrugated iron roof and the side-planks were vertical not horizontal. No matter: 'tis but artistic licence.
Therefore, construction as noted was mainly from coffee stirrers braced with matches and cardboard. The removable roof was made from bristles cut from an old brush stuck on to more cardboard and the veranda was roofed with bits of corrugated cardboard.
After undercoating inside and out in black, I basically dry-brushed the whole thing in various colours to get the effect I wanted. Dark washes were used around the bottom of walls and in the shadows. I have numerous tester pots of house paint lying about and to be honest they do just as well for this sort of work as anything.
The other building I did was meant to represent a collection of shanty houses. This was made from thin polystyrene sheet (pizza packaging) and then covered in corrugated cardboard.
Again, dry-brushing in various colours was the order of the day, with an emphasis on giving things a rusty wash (I use Revell 37 Reddish Brown for that).
And as usual for the bases I textured these from my tub of coarse shelly sand and added various tufts of long grass in the corners.
8 comments:
These buildings are great
Thank you, and a personal happy new year to you. Cheers WW.
Lovely, realistic buildings, well done...and Happy New Year!
They look superb, love the rust effect.
Those are great..I must get some more AK47 games in this year!
Lovely job on those makes me want to get back to my African wars projects too.
All the best with your plans and projects
Cheers
Matt
French Wargame Holidays
Came across your blog today whilst looking for painted examples of Italeri french infantry. Just wanted to say I've really enjoyed looking through your previous posts and find it refreshing and inspiring to find someone working with 1/72 plastics, modelling terrain with whatever is laying around and fitting in the occasional game around ordinary life. Thank you for sharing your hobby life, like I said I've already drawn a lot of great ideas from it and look forward to seeing more in the future 👍
Thanks for your comment Anthony. I just write about what I like and what I do, which is mainly planning and making things and on occasion getting a game in (when I'm not noodling away on diverse musical instruments or wasting my time on pointless computer games). I really like the Italeri figures though but I'm not sure my painting does them justice (I thought the dragoons turned out well mind you) but they're certainly far better than the old Airfix figures. Anyway, more posts on the way when I get time. I've an AAR from our One Hour Wargames campaign to write about where (spoiler alert) my new 15mm Russians gave the French a bloody nose, more figures painted over Christmas to show off (a particularly productive season this year), and some 15mm buildings nearly finished. Lots of other things in the pipeline too. Cheers WW.
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