More Planning Applications

This post picks up where A Matter of Town Planning left off. By the end of the Comments section, I’d pretty much talked myself into repainting the rendering on the two remaining Conflix buildings. Here they are in the header image above.

It’s not that obvious from the photo, but I’ve applied a pinkish wash to the “Merchant’s House” (the larger building). Since I was applying a wash over stippling (or dry-brushing), I gave everything a light spray coat of varnish first. I’ve seen (OK, suffered) some odd effects if I don’t.

I think that this is the Cottage Inn from War World Gaming. It came unpainted as 7 resin pieces: 4 walls, 2 roof pieces and the chimney pot. I goofed when it came to priming – I was nothing like vigorous enough – but it seems to have survived.

Other than adding the ridge tiles to the roof – just a bead of Green Stuff, scribed at intervals – it’s pretty much as-is. The interior isn’t detailed; rather than making the roof removable, I chose to build it as a hollow box (for structural strength).

This is the Tabletop Workshop “Medieval Chapel”, which I bought from Warlord Games. It’s plastic, consisting of 7 pieces (floor, 4 walls, 2 roof sections). It goes together very easily, and is clearly designed for the roof to be removable.

The inside is fully detailed: an altar, benches, candles etc. I built it as two pieces – “roof” and “everything else”. In hindsight, I should have painted the wall and floor sections before construction, rather than making my Life difficult. Oops.

As is probably obvious, painting was very quick, and “mostly dry-brushing”.

This is the Gothic Crypt from Debris of War. It’s a single-piece resin casting, with deeply-incised detail that also has “dry-brushing” written all over it. I strongly resisted painting the walls as grey stone, preferring to keep the warmer tones of the Ruined Chapel I’ve painted from the same range.

I have a slightly mad scheme, to have the above as a lift-out section, with steps leading down to a large subterranean crypt area. However, this probably requires deep terrain tiles (e.g. Sally 4th‘s Terraformers), which I’ve been trying to resist (on storage grounds) since I sold my last ones. We’ll see…

Finally, another Conflix building repaint.. except this time I was a little “enthusiastic” when it came to adding ground foam, washes and other grot. It seemed like a natural objective marker, whether it’s to be searched for hidden treasure, ancient tomes or just a clue as to who (or what) burnt it down.

Well, almost finally. The unsung hero of this post is the grass mat. Every so often, I see someone in the UK posting that Lidl [a supermarket] has grass mats back in stock, in the mysterious “middle aisle”. I have a few terrain mats (in “mouse-mat material”), but find them very, erm, flat. The textured matting for model railways is probably great when applied once (and never touched again), but I’m never sure that it will survive the rigours of gaming.

The above mat is sold as artificial turf, as a 1m x 2m rectangle, for (at the time of writing) the princely sum of £7.99… so, about 10% of the price of a decent 6’x4′ wargaming mat. First impressions are good. I’ve no idea how it reacts to some light over-spraying of car primer (e.g. some greens and browns, to break up the colour)… but at this price, I don’t mind risking the experiment.