Commercial model buildings
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Two views of my TimeCast German farm and shed, with GHQ StuG III.
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I really like TimeCast's buildings (see Links for contact details)- not only are they good value, they also look good. The only downside is that they are quite heavy (they are cast from plaster/epoxy), so you need to base them on something beefy. I initially used my beloved "Focus Basics 6 self-adhesive vinyl floor tiles" but these were too flimsy. I now use 2 mm MDF, as recommended by the TimeCast people.
I use 75 mm square bases for my buildings, the size used in the Spearhead rules by Arty Conliffe (the author of Crossfire). If I need a larger area, I just use two adjacent bases and count the whole thing as a Crossfire building complex.
Here's how I normally go about creating a building terrain piece:
- Undercoat the building with Halford's grey acrylic spray car primer.
- Paint walls, roofs etc. with Tamiya acrylics, lightening all colours with about 50% white.
- Paint windows, drainpipes, etc., normally with dark grey. Sometimes I stick on windows taken from appropriately scaled photographs of buildings.
- Paint the building with a weak wash of india ink and water.
- Glue the building to the baseboard.
- Add walls from plastic sheet.
- Drill small holes through the baseboard for any trees.
- Apply diluted PVA adhesive to the ground and flock with brown (I use Javis brown earth)*
- When dry flock with green for grass (I use Gaugemaster light green foliage)*
- Add rocks (cat litter) and hedges/bushes (Connoisseurs range flexible tree foliage from Javis)*
- Varnish with Krylon matt varnish*
*See Links for details.
In the case of the farm and house shown above, the trees are from TimeCast too. The walls, and the farm entrance gate, are home made.
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Three views of TimeCast's Rostov Town House.