15mm Desert Building
As I began painting up some 15mm Stargrunt figures I bought from Ground Zero Games, I decided that I also needed to make some 15mm buildings. For reasons that escape me, I decided that these buildings would from a dry or desert climate.
The basic structures for the 'desert buildings' were an empty DVD
'barrel' and a plastic container mushrooms were packed in. I then covered both containers with layers of tissue paper and paper towels soaked in a PVA and water mix as a form of paper-maché. I found the tissue paper much easier to work with for fine detail - the paper towel paper was much thicker and had an embossed pattern.
The intention of the paper-maché was to soften the 'harsh' lines of the plastic of the containers and give the structures' surfaces a more natural texture. Once the paper-maché was dry, I was ready to move on to the next stage.
The next step was to create window and door frames. I worked out the
dimensions I wanted for the windows and doors and then cut rectangles of the size of each door or window from plain paper. These rectangles were then glued to the building in the appropriate place. I then made window and door frames from match sticks and glued them to the building along the edges of the plain paper rectangles. When these were dry, I 'melded' the frames to the structure with tissue paper-maché. Finally, a step/stoop, cut from polystyrene, was attached to the rim of the DVD 'barrel' below the door.
When everything was dry, I undercoated with entire structure in black.
At this point I began wondering about roof access. The central "knob" was to become some sort of light well for the interior of the house, so I decided to add a cupola to the roof - made from part of a Kinder Surprise Egg case (which I used here as a mould for casting building bits). I then covered the cupola in tissue paper-maché so it matched the texture of the rest of the building. This, incidently, helped tie the two bits of building together.
A door frame of match sticks was added to the cupola. And, when it was dry, melded to the cupola structure with paper-maché.night.
Once everything was dry, I painted the entire structure with white poster paint, though being careful not to paint in the doorways or windows. After a couple of coats of poster paint, I finished off the wall colour with a wash of Vallejo Gris Palido 990 (Light Grey). The window and door frames were painted GW Graveyard Brown. For the climbing plants, I painted a creeper shape in GW Desert Yellow on the wall/cupola. When this was dry, I traced the creeper with PVA, then sprinkled on some of my yellow/brown flock.
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