The English Civil War has become a definite back-burner project around here, but it is still around, along with ambitions to make some more Western European/British buildings and other scenery for dual use in both ECW and pulp gaming. Dark deeds in the pastoral countryside, that sort of thing, whether it’s with horse and musket or Mauser and sporty roadster!
It turns out that the ever-valuable Internet Archive (previously here on the Warbard) is stuffed with old books on English traditional architecture and buildings. Here’s a fairly random sampling of ones that caught my eye as being useful for inspiring suitable wargaming terrain.
Finally, you can find many more books in this vein by searching the Internet Archive’s Texts collection for Architecture, Domestic — England.
The Shire Publications book Discovering Timber-Framed Buildings is one I’ve seen recommended several places. As usual, check the various other recommendations Amazon and other customers make, good stuff there too. Shire do a whole series of inexpensive English history books that look very useful for those of us who aren’t in the UK but want some inspiration and authentic local details.
Inspired and begun by a thread over on Frothers Unite, of all places.
A few people on the Lead Adventure Forum and elsewhere have asked how the thatch on my variousRussianbuildingswas done, and I”ve been promising some in-progress photos.
I got those shot last month, and finally sat down to edit the pictures and write this tutorial. The basic materials are mattboard (good-quality picture framing card, used for most of the underlying roof structure), light card (used to bridge the spaces between the mattboard pieces and support the towel) and a cheap hand towel I picked up at the nearby dollar store, for the actual thatch.
The roofs pictured below are more complex than many, first because they’re hipped roofs, with all four sides sloping inward, and second because both buildings I happened to be building while I took these pictures have a complex floorplan, one T-shaped and the other L-shaped. I’ll discuss some of the peculiarities of doing towel thatch over a hipped roof in a bit.
I also design most of my roofs to be removable, which complicates design of the underlying structure. All that aside, the basic towel thatching technique is going to be basically the same for a simple gable roof permanently attached to a building or a complex removable roof like I’m doing here!
The roof structure - about as complex as a model roof is ever hopefully going to get!
Above, the main structure of mattboard, with light card over some of the bigger gaps in strips. I don’t bother trying to cover the whole roof, the towel is more than strong enough to support itself once all the glue on it is dry. A simple gabled roof with one ridgeline is obviously going to be a lot simpler!
Towel being glued down, cut oversized so it hangs well over the eves.
On this T-shaped roof, I started the sheet of towel on the top of the T, after putting glue over the card and along the edges of the mattboard pieces, then folded it over the main ridgeline and across the ends. I cut the towel on the hip roof ends and in the valley where the stem of the T goes out, and in several places removed triangles of towel to avoid having multiple layers of fabric piled up. The cut edges got an extra smear of white glue worked into them with a fingertip, to secure and help disguise the edge.
For these roofs, because they were complex enough already, I’ve gone with a single layer of towel, but you can get a nice extra effect by starting with strips of towel, and gluing them up from the eve toward the ridge of the roof in slightly overlapping stips. Real thatch is often laid in layers, and this recreates the look nicely. See my older English Civil War barn article for an example of thatch with strips of towel.
An illustrated explanation of how to fit towelling around a hipped roof's ends. With scissors, cut upward from the eve to the end of the ridge, removing a triangle of towel, then glue the ends over each other with an extra smear of glue to hide the edges.
The photo above should explain how to fit the towel around the sloped ends of a hipped roof, removing triangles of towel to avoid having massive amounts of overlapping fabric.
After the towel has been fitted to the roof, leave the whole thing to dry for a while. Note that the towel is hanging well over the eves at this point, and to keep that fabric from being glued to the table, I’ve propped the whole roof up on a couple of bottles of craft paint. I don’t use the building itself, because I want these roofs to be removable and the next step could easily glue my roofs down to the building by accident!
That’s because the next step is to saturate the towel with dilute white glue. I mix a jar of roughly two parts water to one part white glue, well mixed, then apply it liberally with a big paintbrush, a 1.5″ household brush I use for all sorts of scenery painting. You might think a soaking in watery glue would wreck or warp the underlying cardboard structure, but I’ve done four buildings this way in the last few months and none have warped noticeably.
Remember that you are dealing with towel. It will soak up your glue-water mix like, well, towel. Dab gently with the paintbrush, you don’t want to push the towel around or wrinkle it. After it’s well painted with your glue-water mix, leave the roof in a warm place at least overnight to dry.
After the glue-water mix dries, your thatch will be solid and pretty much self-supporting. Time to trim the eves with scissors, then slap on the first coat of paint. I use black primer, but I could probably have just started with a black towel...
After your roof dries overnight, the glue-soaked towel is basically strong enough to stand up on it’s own. Now you can trim the eves back accurately with scissors, making sure to fit the roof to the building (if it’s removable like mine are) to get a good fit and ensure the eves look good and even.
After that, basecoat with a dark colour, I go straight for black, and mix a bit more white glue into the paint to further strengthen the roof. This is also your chance to trim or re-glue any seams or areas you missed during initial construction. You could skip some of this by just starting with a black or dark brown towel — I started with tan as that was the least-objectionable colour the cheap towel I use came in.
After the black basecoat is finished, I do two drybrush coats to bring the texture of the towel out and make it look like tatch. The first, fairly heavy drybrush is with a 1:1 mix of light brown and grey paint; the second drybrush is brighter, more tan or light brown and less grey in the mix, and i concentrate on the ridgelines of the roof, to make the shape “pop” a bit. You could do more of a straw/yellow colour to your thatch, but real thatch almost always weathers to a grey/brown/black colour fairly quickly.
From left to right, a finished building, with thatch painted as described in the text. Centre, unpainted but with eves trimmed. Right, black basecoat only on the thatch, awaiting it's two drybrush coats.
Finally, a photo from my earlier posting about the two buildings featured in this article, with everything finished except the fence on the L-shaped building. You can see the drybrushed finish that brings out the texture on the towel, and the slight highlighting of the ridges and edges of the roofs.
A pair of new, larger Russian-style buildings for our 28mm RCW games. Click for larger.
Hopefully this helps someone out there tackle their own thatch roof from towel. Remember that the roofs I’ve used as illustration for this article are at about the outer limit of complexity for a thatch roof, being hipped, T- or L-shaped and removable all at once! A simple gable roof can just use a single strip of towel, up one side and down the other; this gets even easier if you build permanent roofs instead of removable ones.
Richard Clarke of TooFatLardies has an interesting article on using putty for thatch, if you don’t want to try towel. I’ll have to give that a shot on the next small building I do, although I think towel is easier and more economical on larger buildings.
Any comments, suggestions or questions, fire them into the comments below and I”ll do my best to respond.
Inspired by Tony’s plank-roof hut tutorial that I linked to in my recent links of interest post, I sat down with stir sticks and my Xacto knives to do up my own version of his hut.
A Russian-style plank-roof hut, after Tony’s tutorial.
My version is 3 inches across the front, 2 inches deep and about 2.5 inches tall to the top of the chimney.
I’ve also been amusing myself recently with fake fur and fabric dye, searching for good loking long grass. I’ll have to write up my discoveries sometime soon, it’s been… interesting.
The new hut will have it’s final paintjob this weekend, more photos of that when it happens.
To celebrate (?) this fine Friday the 13th, another of my occasional posts of links.
Muskie commented on my Youtube scenery videos post to remind me of his fascinating Miniature Painting News Aggregator, which has a neat collection of feeds from all over the place, mostly focused on miniature painting but touching on a number of other hobby elements too. The aggregator apparently started as a private project, and it’s a bit GW-centric for my personal tastes, but it can throw up some neat semi-random content. Well worth a visit, and well worth bookmarking for return visits. (Incidentially, I”ll also recommend Muskie’s Better Hobby Blogging article for those of us who blog. Full of good advice.)
We talk about design, fonts, Inkscape and related topics fairly regularly here on The Warbard, and I’ve just discovered the Lost Type Co-op, a pay-what-you-want font foundry with lots of very nice Art Deco-influenced fonts and others suitable for Interwar/Early 20th C design efforts.
Further on the design and graphics front, Fantastic Maps is, well, fantastic. Jonathan Roberts also has a great collection of Tips & Tutorials that is well worth checking out.
Last but definitely not least, the Barking Irons site has a nicely illustrated Witchlands Hovel tutorial by Tony Harwood. The Witchlands are Flintloque’s version of Russia, and Tony’s article should provide inspiration for plank-roofed rural buildings for Russia and elsewhere.
In fact, I’m going to get off this computer, get some food, then start cutting coffee stir sticks for my own version of a plank-roofed hut!
I don’t spend a lot of time rummaging around on Youtube, so up until recently I’d missed the immense amount of wargaming material there, especially terrain & scenery tutorials. A lot of the model railroad techniques are really too fiddly (or the resulting scenery too fragile) to really work for wargaming, but there’s lots of wargaming terrain vids and some great ones from the model railroaders that’ll work nicely on the wargaming table.
This might be old news to some of you, but I thought I’d link to a couple of good ones I found. Who knows, this might become a semi-regular feature here.
Another YouTuber with lots of good video tutorials is RubbishInRubbishOut of Australia. Here’s his useful Making “Goop” for basing wargaming scenery and terrain, basically a mix of caulking, water, glue and sawdust or sand for texture to quickly add ground texture. He’s got a bunch of other good videos too, well worth checking out.
(I’ve avoided embedding the videos in this post quite deliberately. Half a dozen embedded vids can lock up older computers quite nicely, and the embedding always gets broken on Tabletop Gaming New’s blogroll and other RSS feeds anyway. Go watch the vids on YouTube, they’re worth it!)
These are only fairly quick if you ignore the fact that they sat around for about four months half-finished before I got bored of them taking up space on my project shelf and got them finished!
Actual construction time is quite short, nevertheless, and the results are solid enough for wargaming purposes.
Raw materials for hedge making. Six inch hardwood tongue depressors, soft iron wire (from my local hardware store). Not shown, my hot glue gun.
Adding wire loops, glued down with generous amounts of hot glue at the ends and where the loops touch down on the tongue depressors.
After the hot glue cools and solidifies, paint a slightly dilute white glue/water mix over the tongue depressors and the wire and dump sand and hobby gravel (or a mix of both, as I use here) over. Leave overnight to dry.
After the glue dries on the sand, paint. I use a mix of a couple shades of brown with a bit of black, and a generous amount (about 1 part in 3) of white glue to really solidly glue the sand down to the bases. Again, leave overnight to dry.
Fire up the hot glue gun again. Using a mix of lichen and foliage foam, start hot-gluing foliage to the wire “branches”. You could glue real twigs in too, or add some plastic trees to the mix if you want more height to the hedges. I’ve left this batch fairly low, they’re very roughly chest-high to a 28mm model, with some sections head-high or better and rare breaks lower than that.
The finished hedges on the left, alongside the first batch I did on the right. Each batch is four linear feet of edge (eight six-inch pieces), nowhere near enough if you’re doing Normandy but enough for smaller tables outside of Normandy!
I’ve been house- and cat-sitting for a relative in town the last ten days, so not a lot of action here on the blog, but I did take advantage of having extra space available to get a bunch of wargaming scenery built.
The most interesting pieces are a pair of houses for my growing Russian hamlet. The first is T-shaped, the second L-shaped with a fenced garden/yard area. Both have thatch roofs from towel; building and covering the more complex roof shapes was an interesting challenge. I even got some step-by-step photographs of the roof-building and thatching process, so expect an illustrated tutorial at some point in April here on the Warbard!
A pair of new, larger Russian-style buildings for our 28mm RCW games. Click for larger.
Both buildings have a 5″x4″ footprint and are about 3.5″ to the peaks of the double-hipped roofs. Unlike my earlier church, these two have doors or windows on all sides, so they’re potentially tactically useful instead of just being a line-of-sight blocker like the church.
In addition to the two buildings, I built two large hills (which can butt against each other to form one long ridge) and a smaller hill. I’ve needed more hills for ages, so it was nice to get these made finally. No photos of them, I’m afraid, as they’re buried in the bottom of one of my scenery boxes at present.
I”e also got about about ten new pieces of scatter terrain in progress, not all of which will be ready for my Trumpeter Salute RCW game in ten days, but I hope some of it will be. Photos of that as time allows in the countdown to Trumpeter!
It seems to be a week for belated followup reports to earlier posts here on the Warbard. Ah, well.
I finished up the Russian church at the end of January, amidst all the prep for GottaCon’s pulp game, and never did get around to posting the finished photos here.
The front of the church:
The Church of St. Boris the Intoxicated. Pardon the background, I had to take advantage of daylight and lack of rain together!
…and your first look at the back, and a better look at the main roof. The whole thing wound up being 5″ long, 3″ wide and 7.5″ tall to the top of the spike on the upper dome. That’s small, but really about as big as I usually build a wargaming building.
The rear view of the Church of St. Boris.
Finally, while I was finishing up the church, I threw together a small detail structure to add clutter and interested to my Russian hamlet. Behold, a pigpen.
A pigpen. Oink. Or do Russian pigs say, “Oinkski”?
The pigpen is random offcuts from the church project and about 2″x 3″. The mud is hot glue, from a glue gun, which is something I did as an experiment. Blob glue on, push it around before it cools. After it cools, pick the points and stringy bits off, paint brown and wash, and done. One advantage of hot glue mud is that it won’t warp cardboard or wood bases, unlike using globs of white glue.
Finally made it up to the local branch of Micheal’s craft store after work Wednesday to hunt down material for the two domes of the Russian church. I had planned on using 1″ wooden spheres, but the shelves of random wooden shapes were fairly well picked over and they had no wooden spheres of that size at all.
They did have 1″ wide turned wooden shapes advertised as “decorative rod ends”, though, and I realized they’d make much more interesting onion domes than the simple spheres I’d been planning on.
When I got them home I drilled holes in the top and inserted lengths of wire. One useful thing about turned wood shapes, it’s usually fairly easy to find the centre point, as the lathe tools always leave small ring impressions on the wood. The wire got superglued in, then I used a twist of tinfoil to form the core of the uppermost section of the onion shape. Terracotta Milliput is cheap, sure, but tinfoil is even cheaper!
After that I mixed a small batch of terracotta Milliput and worked it around the wire and foil. I used a 1″ circle I’d cut out of styrene as a rough guide to keep the upward concave curve consistent, and smoothed things down with a wet fingertip. I didn’t fuss with the surface finishing much, a bit of wet sanding after the milliput is dry and another thin layer of putty will finish everything off nicely in due course.
So, behold the domes of the Church of St. Boris the Intoxicated, with the putty still setting on them!
The onion domes take shape. Click for slightly larger, see text for details!
Aside from the domes, the roofs are finished structurally, all shingles and trim in place. I still have to finish the trim around the door and windows, then it’s off to painting.
A quick pair of photos of the small Russian church I’m building for Russian Civil War gaming in 28mm. Earlier in January I discussed some planning and thoughts I had for a wargame-scale small church, and while it isn’t going as fast as I had hoped progress is being made!
My work-in-progress Russian church, alongside the two earlier Russian huts.
As with the huts, the basic structure is mattboard with coffee stirsticks providing the woodwork.
A slightly more recent work-in-progress shot. Shingle roofs are slow going…
The roofs of the church are going to be shingled rather than thatched, and while doing shingles with built-up strips looks good, it is frankly tedious… The smaller roof is done except for trim, though, and the main roof is about half done, then it’s on to the domes to provide that very Russian look that’s so distinctive.
