Battle damaged Asmara town houses

With production going full swing on the 5 town houses for down town Asmara, while waiting for the full houses to dry after getting their undercoat of matt black. I have moved onto producing some destroyed versions, basing them on the same "L" shaped base. I used some off cuts of 5mm foam core board to build the remaining walls, stripping some of the card covering off to expose the foam core and then using a ball point pen to scribe the outlines of the bricks. The exposed bricks then had a coat of PVA applied and the had a light sprinkling of sand applied to give them some texture.

The next stage will be adding in more rubble and general rubbish. The one think that dose strike me about a lot of the damaged building models you see out there, no matter how good they look, is the striking lack of rubble. It always looks to me like someone has been around and cleared up after the artillery strike or bombing raid. So the next stage will be producing some rubble for these two houses.

After finishing these two I'm going to move onto producing some really destroyed buildings, and I'm talking bombed flat.

TTFN

Airhead

Down town Asmara

I've made good progress over the last week with my buildings for down town Asmara, the capital of my version of 1930's Italian Eritrea. I have finished of the tops of all the houses with roof details. I have also beefed up the PVA and sand on the lower parts of the outside walls. Details such as windows with grills over them and general touching up has taken place. The next stage will be to under coat them in matt black paint, and decide on how I'm going to paint them, currently I'm thinking along the lines of having a restricted pallet of colors based around the other buildings I have already built, which mainly involves the use of Greens and Blues.

The next stage in the development of the town will to be the construction of the slum end of town, with lots of small huts and shanties. I'm also thinking about creating some battle damaged versions of the town houses above.

TTFN

Airhead

Finished Fire

A quick update with some pictures of the German para flame thrower, with finished flame and a undercoated para, and below that a couple of pictures of the suppression - bullet strike markers, shown alongside a stand of WW2 Russians for scale. I finished the bullet strikes with a soft spray of grey primer spray paint over the top base earth colour used on the clump foliage that makes up the body of the bullet strikes.

Right, I'm off to the finish painting fritz. TTFN.

Airhead

Small wood on a hill finished

I finally finished my small wood based on a Mod Rock mount, to go onto one of my soft hills. The top picture shows the hill in its bare state. The two lower pictures show the trees in position on the Mod Rock mount from different angles. The leaf litter under the trees is made with tea, from a tea bag, with some small twigs and rocks. I used two different types of clump foliage on the trees to give the look of different types of trees in the wood.

I did this piece as a test of the idea of using Mod Rock as a method of basing additional items of terrain to go onto pre-existing terrain items. Its worked out well and it expands the number of scenarios that I can use my different hill for.

TTFN

Airhead

Small wood on a soft hill

I've been working on a small wood to go on top of one of my soft hills, I first posted on this in January this year, showing how to make the mod Rock former that sits on top of the contours of the soft hill. The tree trunks are garden twigs from the estate, hot glued into position on the mod rock former, small rocks and grit were PVA'd onto the base. The foliage for the trees is a chunk of polystyrene  painted with black acrylic-paint and stuck onto the twigs, it will them have clump foliage glued onto the polystyrene former. As I have done when making my other woods.

Next up is to paint both hill and wood, producing this addition to one of my hills, and it working so well, has prompted me to thinking of other versions that could be produced, hill top villages/forts/fire bases/temples etc...

TTFN

Airhead

Gun fire markers

I have been working on some gun fire markers, to use as suppression markers. They are based on lollipop sticks, and made from paper clip wire and clump foliage. With sand and grit glued to the base. To give the impression of the bullet impacts I have tried to step the bullet strikes, so they start quite small and get bigger as they move along the line. The idea of the different lengths of base is to represent heavy machine gun strikes and sub machine gun fire.

Next challenge will be to decide how to paint them. I'm thinking at the moment of using mainly my usual base colour's, with small amounts of black and grey used for the actual gun strikes. The bottom picture shows some un-painted examples with a base of 28mm scale WW2 Russian infantry. Also thinking of trying out some 1-2p coin based gun fire markers to represent rifle fire.

These markers can be used in other scale as well, they would work well for strafing markers for 15mm scale aircraft shooting up ground targets.

TTFN

Airhead

Free buildings 2

I went over to the GHQ models web site recently to have a nose around in their free stuff  section, I have blogged about this in the past, in August 2010 in fact. I down loaded quite a few of the pdf's then , and over the past 2 years GHQ have uploaded lots of new buildings as 1/300 scale pdf's. So of I went and down loaded and printed out lots of new buildings and scaled them to fit with my 10mm scale areas of interest. WW1 and Franco Prussian war.

The top picture shows a selection of the new buildings that I have constructed, second one down shows a selection of posters and sign that I have down loaded from the Rapid Fire site, and the printed out at a size to fit with 10mm scale buildings. Next picture shows one of the smaller building with a damaged version of its self in front showing the roof blown of with tiles missing.

Next is a picture of one of the big new building, a warehouse from Nijmegan. Last of all to give you a feeling for the size of the buildings a picture with 2 of my Russian 10mm scale tanks, a KV2 and a BT7. My idea is to construct some multi building bases with some of the terraced houses with added out buildings and gardens/yards and then individual buildings, with destroyed or badly damaged versions of some of them.

All of the above picture show the buildings in the early stages of construction, so no extra detailing or painting has been do yet, thats to come next. TTFN.

Airhead