Ancients Project - Some Buildings

I decided I needed some buildings to represent a town for my Ancients project. So this past weekend I found some old wood offcuts and purchased some wooden dowel and made some simple buildings suitable for an ancient setting. With these buildings I used some moulding paste to help:

1. Cover up the gaps in the wood from my schoolboy woodworking skills
2. Create texture for the tiled roofs.

If you are wondering why I am using blocks of wood from the hardware store to create buildings, rather than other modelling products. It all started from when I setup an St. Nazaire game and needed a lot of buildings here. Since then I have taken a wooden block approach as the buildings are practical in the sense that they don't require bases, don't have to be stored carefully, are easy to make, and are cheap to make at a $2 per building (if that).

My test model a small temple

With the exception of the pillars (made from wooden dowel) the other materials are wooden offcuts.

A moulding paste was used to give texture (a new approach with these buildings)

I got the moulding paste from an arts shop. It has the consistency of smooth peanut butter and I both painted it on and layered it on with an old paint brush.

The moulding paste used. It is water based and remains flexible.

Here are some photos of the process of creating the buildings...

Wood offcuts are made into a building.

The moulding paste gets applied and the roof is crisscrossed with a toothpick to give the impression of tiles. This has to be left over night to dry.

A sand coloured base coat is painted on

A suitable terracotta coloured paint is applied to the roofs

A brown wash is applied to the buildings

Windows and doors are painted on in a dark grey as I find black to be too harsh a colour. Then a wash of the original base coat colour is applied to the walls to lighten them up a bit. My original brown wash had been a bit too dark.

Orange is lightly brushed onto the roofs to help pick out the texture and lighten the terracotta look.

The columns get a coat of dark blue followed by a thinned coat of light blue. A brown wash is quickly painted around the windows and doors, no precision painting here!

The buildings are given a coat of PVA glue, then once dry they are ready for the tabletop. 

Time wise this was a relatively quick job:

• One and a half hours cutting the wooden blocks and gluing them.
• Half an hour applying the moulding paste and leaving the buildings overnight to dry.
• A final couple of hours one evening to paint the buildings.

I generally reduce the size of my buildings a fraction to minimise their tabletop footprint and also so they don't dominate the tabletop. From a scale perspective while my figures are 20mm the buildings are nearer 15mm.

So I now have some robust ancient period wargaming buildings which can be thrown into the terrain box container and I don't have to worry about breakages.