Warhammer Townscape page three progress

Buoyed by the completion of page two I've gone to work on page three of the Townscape. Only thirteen buildings left to build (and paint). Perhaps only twelve, as I'm still on the fence about building number 35 (The Tower). It just looks so wonky compared with the rest of the buildings. With that said, lets go for some work in progress pictures of the last batch.

Now to illustrate social differences in the Warhammer world: the huge Manor House next to the cottage. 

26. Manor House
I expected to end this project with (at least) a slight aversion towards building half-timbered houses, and I was actually quite well on the way developing one. Then the roof of the manor house cured me of any such small traumas by providing a bigger one. More on that in a few lines. As the preview picture in the assembly instructions shows, this house is large, going on huge. Let's start with the stairs.

Building stairs can be a prickly affair. 

Working with foamboard instead of cardstock requires some calculations and thoughts about assembly. My foamboard is 3mm thick. If I cut everything to the size of the building instructions in the Townscape book, all my buildings will be malformed (6mm too wide in one dimension, or very crooked). To prevent this, everything needs to be properly resized, taking the width of the foamboard into account. I measured out the steps and decided to use the vertical side to reduce them to the right size. As you can see by the 'acupuncture shot' above, I use needles to reinforce the glued joints. This strengthens the bond and speeds up building times as I don't have to wait for glue to dry. I usually push the nails all the way in (piercing my fingers only 1 out of 10 times, progress from the 1 out of 3 when I started this project). In this picture I remembered to take a photo before pushing the pins all the way in.

All done? Not quite, I mismeasured the height of the stairs. 

I build up the entire stairs and used a bit of thick paper to cover up the front. As I didn't have to take 3mm thickness into account with paper, making it fit was easier. Covering a vertical wall with plaster and PVA will make it quite strong enough for gaming purposes. Steps or flats that will hold (metal) models need quite a bit of extra reinforcement, so I added a number of foamboard supports to the inside of the stairs. These should give it extra strength.

Cutting the basic frame of a house from foamboard takes only a bit of time, decorating it properly on the other hand...

I stuck the assembly to the frame of my manor and quickly discovered I miscalculated the sizes for the stairs (it was too low to reach the door). I removed the thick paper front, cut fresh vertical stair sides and assembled a new set. This time I stuck it right to the front of the house (using pins from inside to the outside). I also used my technical pencil to draw in most of the half timber, thinking it would help with the assembly later (spoiler alert: it wouldn't, but it dit make it easier to dimension my different sized windows properly).

Please stop snickering at my poor mold making skills ;).

After counting my supply of windows I quickly poured some fresh resin to make extras for this house. Turning the 3D prints into molds was a very smart decision. Pouring resin is a lot faster then printing it. Not having to build eleven identical windows from scratch saves - to put it mildly - quite a bit of time.

I should've been forewarned by the size of the roof of the manor house. Luckily I wasn't. I think I wouldn't have started if I had been.

 

Next I covered the entire shell of the house with a thin, plastered on layer of wall filler (see my first post on the Townscape for a few more notes on that). In the process, I covered all of my carefully drawn half-timber lines. By now I've learned to plaster the shell of the building before adding windows, half-timber or any other decorations or details (if at all possible). This saves time cleaning up mistakes. It also makes everything easier to reach, and I can add plaster on the cuts inside door and window frames. This makes the painted building look a lot better (unplastered foam board is quite ugly, especially on its foamy sides).

I can't wait to see how the small barred window in the side will turn out once painted.

I spent a splendid evening cutting half-timber from balsa wood. I've also gotten a fresh box with 1,000 of my favorite coffee stirrers. I had to rip off the top wooden part of the building (the timbered triangle beneath the roof) to put a frame beneath it. It looked very odd stuck straight to the foamboard as it was flatter than the half-timber. I added small wedges beneath the top window/hatch to give it a slightly opened look. Just to make it look a bit more interesting.

Making shutters for the manor house..so many shutters...can't these snobs just live in hovels or cottages like the rest of us?

The Townscape version of the manor has shutters. Being rather dissatisfied with the shutters on my Water Mill, I was loathe to add these. But I decided to go for it anyway (trying something new). I cut (snapped to be honest) a lot of coffee stirrers more or less to size, stuck them to masking tape and added a thin layer of PVA to stick the bits together two by two.

One of the wonderful properties of coffee stirrers is the possibility of cutting them to size with scissors.

After allowing the PVA to dry, I took off the masking tape and used a pair of scissors to cut the shutters to the appropriate size. These constructions are fragile, but strong enough to fix to the manor (where they get support from the half timber frame).

I still can't believe I spend five (almost) uninterrupted hours sticking cardboard tiles to the manor roof.

The last big step for the manor house was the roof. Let me start by saying I underestimated the size of this monster roof. I spent about two hours cutting cardboard tiles (I wanted to make enough for all the buildings on page three). I knew the roof was large, but this monster was so large it took me an entire Sunday-afternoon to build it (about five hours of work). I couldn't believe the afternoon was gone when I finished this monster. If I ever build the whole Townscape again (har har), I'll have to think up a different way to do roofs (I tried strips of cardboard, but I don't like the effect, and around now I don't want to break with the style of the other buildings by trying different techniques). Anyway with this monster done, let's move on to a few smaller buildings :).

27. Cottage
You can see the finished cottage in the picture above. It was almost a therapy building after the manor nightmare. Walls, windows, plaster, siding, roof (small!) and done.

I ran out of my usual air dry clay. The clay on this building needed added water to be handled properly. This soaking the foamboard and made subsequent construction a bit harder. I could've allowed it all to dry first, but I was worried about warping due to wetness. Adding internal supports and a roof helped prevent this. 

28. Customs House
The customs house allowed me to experiment going wild with the Texture Rollers. This building has wooden supports build in the sides, so I didn't have to make the stones fit into each other on the sides of the building. This allowed me to make the stone covered walls before assembly. After assembling the caly covered foamboard, I simply (carefully) cut out space for the wooden side supports to assemble the building and...

Am I a bit overtly enthusiastic about how this one turned out? No way, I love it!

 

...had a customs house build in reasonable time. Should I add another 'small roof' comment here? Nah, let's pretend I have not been traumatized by the manor house roof at all ;) I've also developed a new technique for making 'doorknobs' (door rings?) I cut slices of two different sized plastic rods I ordered off Aliexpress a (long) while back. Glue the large ring to the door and add half of the smaller ring on top. It takes very little time and I think it looks quite nice.

No pictures of the hovel, but here's a WIP shot of the interior wall of the open side of the building. Its tempting to just leave this bare and paint it black, but actually covering the inside makes the entire building look better (for reasons I can't quite explain).

 

29. Hovel

The hovel looked like a quick, small and simple building to make. It turned out to take a lot more time than expected because I had to cut and break a lot of coffee stirrers to get a proper looking wood effect. I thought I'd get better at estimating time needed to build houses as the Townscape proceeded. I was wrong. On the other hand, maybe I'd have given up on this project if I'd correctly estimated the time needed. I do not have a picture of the finished (unpainted) hovel (I forgot to snap one). It turned out quite charming though.  

The temple. After taking this picture, I took the hammer off of the tower as I thought it looked silly. Now I'm in doubt, as I rather like the way it looks on this picture.

 

31. Temple

The temple came with its own interesting challenge. Well, more than one actually. Fitting the tower and the building together with a minimum of crookedness, took some doing. I had to make a slightly larger version of the tower roof as the added stone siding (and plaster) increased the outer dimensions of the tower. My (third attempt at a) new roof looked strangely misaligned. I was pondering whether my measurements were off again (or if this was some of that Lovecraftian 'strange geometry'), when my wife walked in. She took one look at the the rhombus shaped roof, sighed, and took it out of my hands to push it into proper alignment. Have I ever mentioned I'm married to a math teacher? I got a free lecture on mathematical forms, and their proneness to misalign according to shape. I did get the angles right for a change, so marriage saved on that point. 

Who would've thought that a Stormcast shield would look so appropriate on an Oldhammer building?

 I wanted to do some two-tailed comet style decorations on the temple. So I took out my bits box (bits chest is a more apt description), found a lecture board and bells from the flagellant kit, a round Stormcast shield and some Stormcast armor decorations to add to the doors. I still haven't been able to paint a Stormcast in a color that makes it look like a fantasy model (to my taste), but they are a great source for bits if you want to decorate Oldhammer buildings. Who would've thought :) Now stop screaming and clawing at your eyes you grognards! 

A proclamation nailed to the church door? Where have I heard that story before?

 

I used another round Stormcast shield above the tower door. I failed a WP test to resist adding an extra skull (-10 as it is a Warhammer building). I think the small eagle's head above the door is from the modern Warlord titan kit. I can't recall where the large scroll is from, and found an actual two-tailed comet style doorknob for the door (flagellant kit FTW). The stone siding of the tower was made with 2mm cardboard. It was a rotten and time consuming job to cut 5mm and 10mm pieces of carboard to size, and glue them on alternately, but it looks good. Plastering between the cardboard stonework was another difficult job. I think I (more or less) pulled it off. I watered down some instant filler and covered the cardboard with it. It should give it some extra strength, and it adds a bit of texture.

Now there's a WIP shot if I ever saw one. These two buildings 'need some more work'.

 

30. Stable and 32. Jail 

For those of you calculating along, I did indeed miss building thirty up there (it's in the background of a few of the temple shots). The stable is a stone building (no wooden beams on the sides). Experience taught me that to texture-roll this, I had to reinforce the shell to resist the pressure of the roller. I also (uncharacteristically) had to wait for the glue to actually dry before proceeding with the texturing. That's why I started on the temple early. Even with those precautions, adding stone texture to the stable was harder than expected. The doors weaken the construction and if you press a pattern in one side you can't properly support the building on its opposite side. Because you need to make the sides (more or less) meld together, you can't simply wait for one side to dry. I'll take some extra pictures of the stonework when I add a roof and doors to the building. Suffice to say, it will require some creative poster-placement and shrubbery after painting. I also built the frame of the prison. Getting it right turned out to be more difficult then I thought. The 3mm extra size of the foamboard, in combination with the L-shape of the building, added an extra layer of difficulty. I compensated by adding reinforcement, gluing in an extra strip of foam inside (to cover a mistake). Only now that it's finished, I realize my life would've been much easier if I had just made two blocks and stuck them together in an L-shape........sigh. 

And here's (a print of) page three of the instructions. Only three (or four) serious buildings left to construct (and two small ones). 

 

Four buildings are now ready to prime and paint. Another two are in need of roofs, doors and decorations. After these, I only have six more buildings left to construct. Four of these are actual buildings, one of which (the tower) I'll probably skip. I suspect the final two will be easy (I can't wait to get started on the latrine and the two tents for that reason). Then again, guessing time required is not my strong suit. I can almost smell the finish line (and a lot of universal glue, PVA and instafiller).