Back to the Buildings

All the windows for the 3 cottages now painted and the basic shape of the chimneys are also finished, so I thought I would post how far I have got with them.

 All the doors, just need to be glued on when the main building is complete.

 Coated all these windows and doors in oak, acrylic wood stain.

Basic chimney construction, using cappa board and cereal packet card, need to edge the chimney breast against the tiles of the roof.

High Elf Photo Shoot

Recently I finished painting and converting a new 2000 pt army for the High Elves. High Elves were my first army, a long time ago, and I have about 10,000 pts in total. However I have not been playing much in last year and there were some units that needed some attention or had not really been started.

As you may have guessed I often do things on the cheap, hence I buy all my stuff from ebay and even then only models that are old and not particularly sort after. I do not have a problem mixing old and new models at all and love to badly convert old plastics to new purpose. I love the game and the craft, but do not like the prices.

So this is the army I played with last, about a month ago, against my friend, who played vampire counts- for the first time with the new book- and they won. Not a common occurrence, something I will try to prove by posting a few battle reports in the future.

I will post details of the exact army list tomorrow, including magic items etc.
Was such a lovely day today had to take opportunity to shoot the army.

Dungeon entrance

This may well be the inspiration for a main entrance for my dungeons. It is, unbelievably, the rear exit to a bear pit I visited in a South Yorkshire garden center. Yes I said, Bear Pit.....When I start will post some pictures.

Secret Windows

Have been making the windows and doors for the three buildings. As you can see, when I start a project like this I tend to go industrial, with a small "I", so here are all the windows and doors for all three buildings.

I've used rectangles of card 15 mm by 20 mm and used matchsticks and BBQ skewers to form the frame. 

When they are all dry i'll paint them off the cottage model and stick on all complete, hopefully it'll be easier.

Village taking shape

Have been working on the next three cottages, all at once, which has really moved the whole process forward quite quickly. Who am I kidding, still taking forever and is stopping me from painting all the stuff I have to do. But its what I do, start something, then get distracted....
Anyway some pictures:

At this point I've bricked up all the walls and gable ends, made the basic roof sections and left to set.

All the tiling is done and roof sections complete, now to add chimneys before painting.

Cottage Painting

Finished painting the basic cottage, It gave me all sorts of problems, will talk about those in a bit. Used the cheapest paints I could find. Not keen on using my citadel paints on large construction jobs. This model was painted using tester pots, a deep blue, grey/black, lighter grey and brown. I had to use an old pot of blood red to cover the roof, but after black undercoat I dry brushed the red on, so didn't use too much.

So now to the problem, mainly that when I covered the model in stain at the end of the painting, the stain turned the whole model a very dirty brown/red. The grey tones of the stone all disappeared! Not happy I had to go back and dry brush grey over to bring it back out again. Won't be using that stain on the next cottage,

My plan next is to create 3/4 more cottages and to alter some of the buildings I already have to form the rest of a village/town.

The Village

This is my basic design for the buildings that will form the backbone of all the villages/towns and cities that any adventurers decide to visit. A while ago now I decided that like a dungeon can be adventured in, settlements should be too. My first port of call was to create the town board, as seen in my second post, then to create all the buildings in the village

From here I intend making another 3 or 4 and changing some of the larger buildings I already have to make them suitable.