Friday 4 April 2014

Dark Ages Church WIP

A few quick WIP shots of my Dark Ages church, inspired by some excellent churches here, here and here.

The main body of the church is made from 3mm foamcore card on a hardboard base, dressed with a mix of coffee stirrers, balsa strip and some balsa sheets for the doors and floor. The floor has been laid as planks, but I suspect it may have been bare stone flags or even dirt in early churches. I've made a bit of a pigs ear of the inside of the doors, as I was going to leave the roof attached,  so they may get boxed in to some kind of archway to hide them.




The thatch roof is green pan scourers split down the middle to make two thin sheets. These are affixed to a roof former of foamcore with PVA and then once dry are painted with 50/50 dilute PVA and water to stop them shedding and add stiffness. You have to be careful with the dilute PVA as it can make the paper backing on the foamcore soggy if you are too liberal.



The building has been under-coated in cream exterior textured paint to seal and add texture to the foamcore. The next stage is to basecoat and then start the highlighting process, which I will start with the airbrush to get most of the colour on, then switch to stippling for the daub texture on the walls. The roof will be airbrushed black and then dry brushed up to a pale grey-brown to represent old thatch.



4 comments:

Jay said...

Nice modeling!

Millsy said...

Looks great! I'm kind of regretting not making my roof removable now. I'll be watching this with interest mate and thanks for the link.

Barks said...

I'm very impressed with the roofing technique, I'll have to try that. I've never been a huge fan of the teddy-bear fur technique.

GJD said...

I've never tried the teddy bear fur, but I've always felt it looked like the buildings were wearing wigs...