BUILDINGS: Two things I'd say. For skirmish games you need models you can get inside, ideally a little oversized, with real doors and windows and furniture inside. For 'big battle' games you are showing a 'built-up area', as the phrase is, so smaller and less elaborate buildings are called for. Secondly buildings are very labour-intensive compared with, say, hills and rivers. Let's look at this --- COMMERCIAL BUILDINGS. The modern resin pieces are great, and I suggest that you consider buying rather than making in many cases. Clean up the piece with a knife and file, then prime it with spraypaint; usually black, sometimes brown or grey, depending on the main colour. I'm a drybrusher myself, 2-3 coats to get depth and a mellow, aged look. For stone buildings, I then go back and pick out a few stones here and there in a slightly different colour, for variety's sake. You can also use a wash technique, flooding the initial main colour with a thin coat that sits in the crevices; I often do both. Outline transitions between walls and roof, windows etc with a thin dark line. I paint windows black, though I have seen people do happy-looking blue ones! Wooden buildings start out a natural tan shade, darken and begin to weather to a grey, especially on the roof I've seen far too many models painted the shade of an oak-finish bookshelf. Half timbered buildings can be painted either by painting the 'white' first and then the 'black' timbers, or the other way round, which is how I tend to do it. Buildings look best on bases that merge into the landscape rather than standing foolishly on the grass of the main board. I'll usually put them on a base with garden plots, walls, washing on a line etc. I make modular town sections of multiple buildings based together with roads, trees, statues, whatever, to fit with one another. Imagine four 15mm Spanish houses on a 6" square base around a dusty plaza with a well, a town cross ---- maybe a stray dog --- you see what I mean. MAKING YOUR OWN This is in many ways the hardest kind of scenery modelling if you aren't a woodworking enthusiast, which I'm not. So I'll talk about some 'easy tricks' and specific kinds of project that won't take 100+ hours. Adobe and other mud type structures are easily made. Method 1. Get a small cardboard box (like the kind business cards come in), turn it upside down. Cut out a few doors and windows. Smear some plaster here and there, and paint it like we did the desert hills, with sand and drybrushing. Add doors and shutter from scrap wood. Dead easy! But not, perhaps, everything it could be. Use the same box but don't turn it over. Instead, make a flat card roof with a strip of balsa/cherry/ basswood around the edge as a very low wall. This means you can take the top off and get inside. make a wooden base to give the thing some weight. Still very simple - and too much wet paint may warp the card - but can be very effective. Half my own New Mexico town is made this way. Method 2 involves using 1 1/2" wide wooden strip sold as 'lattice' for garden decoration. It's cheap in basic form. All you have to do is measure out the lengths of walls, draw in doors and windows, and cut them out. Since I don't want to spend hours on doors and windows, I find that a simple vertical cut on either side, followed by a slight push on a fine chisel (no need to hammer) will cut out the openings smoothly. Taking the piece you just cut out, use the chisel to take off the part that will complete the window - either upper or lower part, your choice - and glue it carefully back in place (see diagram), Glue the walls together on a base, ensuring they are properly 'square' to one another. Add a roof, either a flat roof from card or hardboard, possibly with the wood strip around the edge or an angled roof supported by triangular sections of wood that sit on the lower end walls, Adobe buildings tend to took boring without some decoration, so I tend to use a lot of shutters, exposed support beams, or'crumbling' areas where a few cardboard stones are seen exposed by fallen plaster. Drape colourful 'blankets' on the roof or out of windows - simply bits of paper from catalogues or magazines showing fabric designs, sprayed with 'dullcote'. Terracotta roofing - the 'Spanish tile' look - can be made from strip s of the fine corrugated card found inside light bulb packaging; lay it from the bottom upward, with each strip overlapping the lower. Using the same technique of lattice strip, make two storey buildings by stacking on level atop another. Stone and brick buildings can be made by facing the walls with single cardboard bricks or sheets of commercial brick paper - available at model railway shops. Half-timber by glucing fine wood strip onto the walls (paint both wall and timbering first). The 1 1/2" lattice is perfect for 25mm figures, but buildings with higher walls can be made by adding 1/4" basswood strip around the top or bottom of the wall. Plastic window frames sold for model railway buildings are very useful - I use them widely in my wild west buildings - but fine mesh screen netting or'plastic craft canvas' (another craft product used in the cross-stitch hobby) can serve as windows. ROOFS Are important, obviously, I have found that having the end wall sections attached to the roof help it maintain shape better than simply making an angled shape that perches on the peaks of the end walls. Use sturdy card, and use several supports underneath to maintain the correct shape, I tile roofs by cutting long strips of index card two lines wide ' cut through the first line only at regular intervals, giving a strange fringed effect. Glue the second, uncut, line to the roof, staring at the bottom. Go up, laying the fringed section over the glued line of the previous piece. Lay them for an overlapping effect, and you'll see a rustic tiled roof appear. Once you've got to the top, let it dry. Flip up a few of the tiles for extra irregularity!. I spray with varnish to strengthen, then black and dry-brush. Thatched roof can be made from plaster, scored with a toothpick before drying, or 'fun-fur', matted down with a thin solution of plaster and left to dry before painting. A favourite item of mine is the cavern. A hot wire cutter helps with this, but careful use of the old breadknife will work too. While building any kind of rock formation, cut the top section out at any point, preferably in a jagged way so that it fits back in 'jigsaw' fashion. Setting the top aside, cut out a section of the interior to resemble a cavern. If using thick chunk Styrofoam, cut all the way through to the next layer, and you'll have a chamber 1 1/2 or 2" deep - remember, there's no point in having a cave unless outlaws, bears, German 88s and cannibals can lurk inside, is there? Make an entrance to the cavern from the outside. Throw the bit you cut out away. Put the top section back on. You've got a cave! Add a stone or something heavy enough to weigh down the roof section, and feel free to add details to camouflage the entrance. CORNER AND EDGE PIECES Most maps of battlefields feature terrain features that extend off the table, Therefore we can make imposing terrain that defines the'edge of the world'! . All this means is that we make hills that are flat on one side for edges, or on two for corner pieces. This works well with the kind of extravagant rock formation that we don't want to dominate the whole table, just prevent the enemy cavalry reaching our flank --- the best way of showing a mountain pass or ravine I know is to show it coming in from a corner, with extending 'wings' of high ground along adjoining edges. Coastline for naval games can be made as narrow strips of board, rising from the shore to the edge of the table where it drops off into infinity! Reversing the idea, wide rivers, lakes and seas can be made with one edge abutting the land and the other mysteriously ending at the table edge - I made the Nile in sections 12" wide with one edge on the shore and the other resting on the table edge. Inspiration (1) I am convinced that many wargamers never leave the house, judging from what their ideas of scenery are! If you are housebound, you can find ideas for scenery from TV (watch a travel programme! ) or movies (John Ford Westerns shot in Monument Valley, 'The Mountains of the Moon' or'The Wind and the Lion' for colonials, 'Rob Roy' or 'Braveheart 'for glorious Scottishness). Look at old National Geographic magazines, or anything with good colour photos. Inspiration (2) So leave the house! Go out and look at trees, at hills, at rivers! Notice that treetrunks are more grey than brown, that muddy ground is darker than dry, that the ground under trees is not usually grassy, and that woods in winter still have autumn leaves underneath. Hills are often barer than plains. Rock formations have all kinds of colours in them. Trees aren't all the same shape and colour. Go hiking, Wander around real battlefields if you can. I live within 30 minutes of the battlefields of Chickamauga and Lookout Mountain, so I am spoiled, but that doesn't directly help me make models of Portugal or Norway. What does help is seeing how vegetation clings to hillsides, and grass grows at roadsides, and all those natural things that apply globally. If you can manage it, travel to your chosen theatre of operations. One day I shall see you at Khartoum -- WHAT ELSE? I just read an article in a book on model railway scenery about converting an old bath matt into a very authentic-looking swamp. Gosh! Now, that tells me something about possibilities that I might never have thought of Everything is potentially something else, he says, inscrutably. So here's a plastic cup, a bag of sawdust and some brown paint; I'm off to steal some pinebark from the front of the Methodist church. More Scenery for the Common Man Introduction, Materials, and Tools Project 1: New Set of Hills Project 2: Streams and Rivers Covering the Table Roads, Walls, Trees Buildings Back to MWAN #105 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2000 Hal Thinglum This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com