It is time to finish building Stalino so we can get the campaign going! I wanted the plaster on my houses to be in a bad shape. It looked like that on my reference pictures and it will give an nice 3D feeling to the buildings. As I built the walls in foam-board I just took a hobby knife and carved away in places where the plaster had given way! Then I took a medium filler with some water and applied it to the walls with an small flat stick, leaving the places where I made holes in the foam-board without filler. I think it turned out well, The filler gives a good structure and it was quite easy to apply, very easy if you don´t make any holes that you then have to look out for! The roofs will be made out of planks, and I will make them with balsa wood. To give the roof the look of repairs I painted the balsa sheets (1.5 mm) first and them glued them on the basic roof structure in foam board. This also helps you to not get PVA-glue on the balsa before painting as it really disturbes my very water heavy painting style. I treat the balsa with the back-side of a hobby-knife before painting as the "wash-style" paint I use (black hobby-paint, with much water) applies well, and in a couple of second it looks lika a wall/roof/floor! I painted the balsa in two stages and let the first dry before the second turn was done, in this way I achived a nice water/moisture-damaged look. Then I did some more balsa work to finish the roofs with barge-boards and so on. I used 1.5 mm balsa here as well, but it looked a bit rough so I had to trim them thinner with a hobby knife after gluing them to the roof... unnecessary extra work as I could have used 1 or 0.5 mm balsa in the first place! Then it was time for one plank floor. The other got dirt-floors as it was faster, a little too time consuming to get the balsa sheets in the right size for the rooms after the walls are built - if you want plank-floors, which looks really nice, make them before the walls are put in place. I also added door frames and windows. As this campaign is set for Stalino, which is located in Ukraine - we had to get some sun-flowers. We got them from Woodland Scenics who sells railroad modeling stuff. To plant them firmly I made a little ball of milli-put to stick them into and then glue them in. After I washed them with some watered down brown to get away from the plastic finish most model train stuff have.
After this I was pleased! Something beautiful in the horrible year of 1941... It is said that many Ukranians survived on sunflower-seeds because that was the only food that the Germans left to them. But then one of my fellow gamers came to visit and with the comment of "Very cute, but don´t they look like gigantic buttercups!?" I knew something had to be done. So I trimmed the petals to a more sun-flower like apperance with a sharp scissors, which was a pain as they were already firmly stuck in the base!
2 Comments
Jonas Svensson
27/9/2015 12:11:42
Best Stalino houses this far!
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ov
20/10/2016 07:21:22
Impressed
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WW2 Campaign BlogThis blog follows the second Chain of Command club campaign, set in the intense fighting over Stalino in October 1941. Archives
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