Henrietta Games: 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.