Chinese Buildings

Obviously I am going to need some terrain for my game so I might as well get started as early as possible! I use Pinterest quite a lot to build up mood boards for projects so I've spent some of my winter evenings trying to figure out what I want the buildings on my table to look like. 

There are commercial options such as Warbases 55th Day range and Oshiro models chinese range and I'll no doubt buy bit from both in the future but to start I wanted to have a go at scratch building some houses from scratch. 

Having acces to a lasercutter at work has it's advantages so I cut out the basic parts of the buildings and added window pattern and deatils around doors and stuff. It's all cut from 5mm plywood and then mounted on a 3mm mdf base. I doubled the wall thickness on the sides but reduced the size so that the front and rear walls fitted. It also left some space to put roof supports so that when I put the tiles in place they have something to adhere to (something a learned from the roman villa build).

Then It was on to detailing. In China (as in anywhere else) there are range of building materials and although a lot of buildings are made of brick a lot are made of wood so I decided these first ones as wooden. The framing of the buidling is made of Balsa and inbetween these I cut mounting board into strips and glued it to the ply as planking.

Once both frontages were done it was on to adding a bit more deatiling. The lanterns and jars are beads and the door handles are made from wire rolled round a file and cut to produce a circle. The roof tiles were then added, this is vaccum formed polystyrene sheeting that I got from Green stuff world. Excellent stuff.

The planking was continued round the sides and backs of the buildings. A third building was added to the rear of the base. This is going to be a barn in the rear,

More planking....

On with the tiling on the rear parts of the buildings and the framing on the barn...

The end of the smaller house was given a plaster finish (mostly as a practice for later buildings) using some air drying clay. The barn started to get its planking, the roof is going to be a rough thatch and I want a little roofed gate between the barn and the small building.

So that's where we are just now. Hopefully there will be some more pics very soon. 

Cheers