Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Monastery

My Friend Boe makes excellent foam core buildings.   The Brigade Games folks decided we wanted to run a Peninsular war game for Cold Wars.  Our emphasis was skirmish - and taking advantage of the British Rifles figures recently released,  These feature a gruff officer with a heavy cavalry sword and his burly Sergeant with a Volley gun http://brigadegames.3dcartstores.com/BG-NBR074-British-Rifles-Veterans-Command--Chosen-Men-2_p_4963.html and their supporting characters http://brigadegames.3dcartstores.com/BG-NBR073-British-Rifles-Veterans--Chosen-Men-5_p_4962.html.

One of the foci of the action would be a Monastery that blocks a supply route.
I gave Boe a couple of pictures I found that covered the basics. He did a Work in Progress series as he built it and I wanted to do some of the process of finishing the complex.

Boe delivered the finished foamcore complex.  The first step was to add aa stucco texture.  I used a mixture of Liquitex Ceramic Stucco, Liquitex Heavy body matte gel, Golden Coarse pumice and some latex paint.  Years ago I found a good base ground color in the "OOPS" bin at the hardware store.  These generally cost less than half the cost of custom mixes.  I mixed a big batch since I did not want to run out before everything was coated at least once.

I also prepped the damage sections with gravel, sand and some glue binder

 Any of the mixes will wreck a paintbrush since the grit gets jammed to the base of the brush so I used a combination of silicone pastry brushes and artists trowels to spread the stucco. 






 Next up is crackle paste.  This does a great job at creating the natural cracking that you see in real stucco

Natural crack from the crackle paste
 I used some Hirst Arts blocks to build a fountain for the inner courtyard

 The building is painted so I needed to work on the base and courtyards.  I laid out the compound and cut a piece of HDF board so that I would have a couple of inches on each side.   I used a coarse sandpaper to bevel the edges.  I then spread a tube paintable white caulk across the base, pressed the buildings into place and left to dry.

  I really wanted to secure the buildings so I caulked around the edge of the buildings then pressed in cardboard pieces to represent flagstones

 Once the caulk was dry the ground needed to be painted.  I based this on the OOPs paint and added some darker paint so there would be some gradations in color.


 The painted ground color is then flocked.  I started with flowers and tufts.  Then a liberal coat of two colors of static grass. 


Stray picture of the cracking

 Roof is on, flock still needs to be brushed off.
The roof was basecoated with spray TerraCotta then drybrusheda lighter shade
 Extra flock removed and some vines added

Inner courtyard with flowers and fountain.  The fountain water effects will dry clear and glossy

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