Buildings - home made
I have made quite a few model buildings over my 25 years of wargaming, ranging in size from 1/76 downwards. In many ways it is easier to make buildings in 6 mm as you can get by with a lot less detail. I have found the following technique works quite well.
 Home-made house and restaurant. |  The "original" restaurant in Cognac. |
Step 1
Go on holiday to somewhere with buildings similar to the ones you want to make. Then take photos of them.
I had a particularly effective photographing fenzy in Cognac. Try to take the photos from full on to a side.
Step 2
When you get home, sun-tanned, well-fed, and happy, get the photos into PhotoShop or something and scale and distort them so they are the correct size for your models. Then assemble the different views in a drawing package to make external wallpaper (if you see what I mean), and print it out.
In many cases you will not have been able to get photos of all sides of the building, so make up the missing sides by editing/cutting/pasting from sides that you do have.
Step 3
Make up some plastic sheet shells (I use 1 mm thick polystyrene sheet for the walls, and 0.5 mm thick for the roofs), and fix your wallpaper to the outside. I have found that Epson printer ink does not run when covered in liquid polystrene glue, so you can hold the printed paper in place and then apply the glue over it.
Step 4
Tidy up by
• filling any holes with filler,
• painting any surfaces you don't have wallpaper for,
• basing
• adding pavements etc. (I print these out onto paper)
• flocking the base
• adding hedges and trees etc.
• varnishing
 Another home-made house. |  The "original" house in Cognac. |
Variants
Once you have made your wallpaper, you can modify door colours, swap open window images for closed window images etc. and reprint to make additional buildings.
The big problem with this method is that you can never get enough buildings, so you will be always wanting to go zooming off on holiday again!
Like to make some buildings yourself?
The paper buildings page gives more detail about how to make the models, and some files to download.