Making scenery: BUILDINGS

First, instructions of how to make some buildings from foam-board. All the buildings in the examples shown are for World War Two 1/72nd scale wargaming, but the same techniques could be used for other sorts of building model.

Here we see the bits cut out from the board, for a fairly simple house. The material itself is a sandwich of two thin layers of card, with plastic foam in between. You can buy this from art shops, but I have scrounged mine from a supermarket. The supermarket had made signs advertising that month's latest offers, and had hung them from the ceiling. At the end of the month, the signs were thrown away. One big sign is enough to make several buildings. Painting the buildings is a little harder, since one has to cover all the printed advertising. The stuff you'll find in art shops is plain white.

The scalpel is my favourite kind. They have plastic handles with a bit of flex to them, and are cheap (about 37 pence). They are sold as "disposable" which means that they want you to throw them away when the blade gets blunt, but in fact the blade can be replaced, just as the blade on a metal-handled scalpel can. I have tried several shapes of blade, and I like this one best all-round.

You can see that I have marked out where all the doors and windows are to go, but have not cut them all out. Some windows will have shutters glued in the shut position, so I have left them alone at the cutting stage.

The pieces for a much more ambitious house. One thing I have learned, is that if you make the houses true to the scale of your figures, then they look awfully big. Perhaps it would be wisest to make buildings a bit too small for true scale. The plastic kits of buildings one can buy, tend to be small for their scales.

The next stage is to glue the pieces together. Notice that in this photograph, you can see pins stuck through the pieces, to hold them in place as they dry. This is better than using rubber bands or clothes pegs.

Next, you have to glue the house to a sturdy base. I have used VERY thick card for this purpose. The foam board is too thick for this, and most card will warp when paints and glues congeal on one side of it. Fortunately, the building itself acts as a stiffener for the base. I have made the base bigger than the building because I want a rim all the way around. The main purpose of this rim is to protect the building during storage and transport. If it shifts around it its box, then the edge of the rim, and not some part of the building itself, will hit the inside of the box.

Note the brown packing tape (gummed paper, not self-adhesive plastic) which acts to smooth and strengthen some corners.

Now to add some texture to the outside surface. I have used two methods. I have not concluded that either is better than the other. When doing one, I become convinced that the other is quicker.

Here we see an example of method 1. The house is covered with blotting paper. I have tried other types of paper, and only got a couple to work. The paper must go very floppy when wet, which most paper will not. Apart from blotting paper, the only other type I got to work was some rustic hand-made paper. Water-colour paper does not work, so don't waste your time and money trying it. Cut the paper roughly, to be big enough to go all around the house, and glue it on with thinned PVA glue, then trim. Cut X-shaped slits in the windows and doors, and glue back the flaps to cover the inside edges of the window frames.

Note that the blotting paper has ripped a bit during the gluing stage. It does become very weak when wet, but this doesn't matter, as the rips look a bit like cracks when glued down.

Here we see a technique to give the impression of bricks exposed by broken plaster rending. Some plastic brick card, bought from a model shop, has been glued on in patches. Before adding the blotting paper, the rest of the wall sections around the brick card have been built up to the same level as the brick card, by gluing on cereal-packet card. The blotting paper has been glued over the top of the cereal packet card, but not over the brick card, so the blotting paper, representing the plaster rending, appears to have been broken away, and the exposed bricks appear to be beneath it.

This is the other method. I mixed plaster rending for the building, using Tetrion wall filler, PVA glue, water, and sand. There are other wall fillers which would do the same job. They come as a white powder. You might want to add some paint to the mixture, so that if the model gets damaged, and paint flakes off, then the revealed plaster underneath won't be gleaming white. I think that the sand was a mistake. Adding sand gives a rougher texture, but it makes the mixture harder to apply, and the sand will wear out your brushes when you come to paint it. I've tried it without sand, and it works fine.

Note the windowsills and door lintels, which are medium-thickness card, cut into rectangles and glued on. These make a big difference to the look of the finished building. Down the front edges of this building, I have added columns of corner stones. These were simple to do. I cut out lots of 3x1 rectangles of thick paper. These, I folded at right-angles, so that one side of the fold was a 1x1 square, and the other side was a 2x1 rectangle, and I then glued these on, alternating long and short ends above each other, leaving little gaps in between. This gives the building a Euro-Baroque look, which is quite appropriate for World War Two northern France, Holland, and Germany.