For this installment of the "28mm on a Budget" article series, I'd like to turn our attention to the subject of fantasy buildings. Long a staple of fantasy gaming, fantasy buildings tend to come in three distinct varieties.
- Card buildings — Great looking from a distance and quick to assemble, these cheap buildings with their pre-colored surfaces tend to lose some of their charm when viewed up close.
- Resin buildings — Often pre-painted and typically incorporating textures, angles and layers that would be time consuming to scratchbuild, these buildings look great on the tabletop but make you pay for it.
- Scratchbuilt buildings — These models are affordable (like card buildings) and offer detail and textures (like resin buildings). Unfortunately, whether using card, balsa, or cast bricks, it's time consuming to go this route.
However: what if there was a way to get some of the textures, complex shapes and pre-painted-ness of specialty resin buildings, the speed of preparation of card buildings at a cost not much higher than supplies for scratchbuilt buildings....?
I give you porcelain Christmas houses. Usually scaling nicely with 28mm, and available after Christmas for $4 to $12 each, these prepainted houses are just the thing for populating your fantasy village.
OK, so they're not ideal right out of the box. There are 3 things you must know about Christmas houses.
- They often have snow and christmas ornaments molded on to them.
- Some are made of a soft plaster-y porcelain that can be sanded, but many are made of a porcelain so hard that it cannot be sanded and will resist all your efforts to modify them. The flip side is that the hard porcelain houses often tend to have sharper, more defined details. It is unlikely that you will be able to modify these to have accessible interiors unless your goal is to make burned out shells of buildings a la Mordheim. For recommendations on going that route, I highly recommned the resources available at Necromundicon.
- Some Christmas houses will require a bit of additional exterior work, mostly because some have holes in the back for lights (most are lit from below) and some have doors that are too small.
How to convert Christmas houses into Fantasy Buildings
What you'll need:
- Houses
- Paint — I use bottles of craft paint
- "Dip" (I use Minwax Polyshades) and mineral spirits. Alternatively, you can use acrylic washes
- Flocking material for vines and moss
- Bits for customizing if necessary. Doors can be especially useful.
- Tacky glue, PVA or scenic cement.
1) Choosing your houses
If your store's after-Christmas selection, or you're limiting yourself to resale houses, you may have to take what you can get. But if possible, try to find houses that are closest in scale to 28mm and as similar as possible to fantasy and medieval styles. Buildings inspired by the Christmas tales of Charles Dickens are often your best bet. Christmas decor and snow are easily covered up, but houses with protruding modern details molded onto them are unsuitable for our uses.
For sources, the best selection and prices occur at craft and hardware stores (like Menards here in Chicagoland) after Christmas, when $20 to $40 dollar buildings get marked down to 75% off.
Christmas houses often appear at resale shops year-round for pennies on the dollar, and asking your family and friends may net you some freebies.
The houses I used here are pieces that I collected as a child, mostly bought at Jo-Ann Fabrics. I've kept a few for Christmas decor, but there were far more in my mother's garage than any reaonable person would have use for.
2) Building modifications
Try to do as few of these as possible. Usually a bit of balsa or some model windows or doors are enough. A bit of plaster over the offending area covered in flock (see step 5) will often do the trick for areas needing to be covered.
This church had a large opening in the back for lighting, but it also had snow drifts along the edge of the building. I had to break away the bottom — unfortunately it's made of the hard plaster and a large area broke off. I repaired it by gluing some of the shards back on and gluing a plastic door over the opening.
3) Paint touchup
The paint jobs on these houses are often rushed affairs. Use your own paints to quickly touch up the paint jobs. Don't worry about an exact color match, as the dip or washing step will tend to blend them together.
3) Drybrush the roofs
You can do more drybrushing and highlighting if you wish, but we're going for fast prep, and drybrushing the roof tiles is a quick way to really sharpen up the look of the buildings.
4) Paint over the roof snowdrifts and Christmas decorations
I used brown paint as it is a nice base for the dreary green-brown moss/ivy look that I'm going for. I even put brown paint over areas without snowdrifts where I wanted to later apply moss or ivy as it gives a bit more depth when you can't see the building colors under the flock.
5)Texture the ground snowdrifts Using ballast, sand, or textured paint, cover over the snowdrifts on the ground and paint those areas a suitable ground color. They'll soon be covered in flock in step 7.
6) Dip or wash
I liberally applied Minwax Polyshades Tudor all over the houses and then dabbed up any pools with a brush. Its black pigments really darkened the buildings nicely and created nice shading effects. I tried Minwax Antique Walnut, a brown shade I use often for miniatures, on one wall, but it didn't look right to me.
I used Minwax because I'm very familiar with it,
having used it to brush-dip hundreds of figures. Also, it's quick to apply — though it takes 36 to 48 hours to dry completely — and will add a very nice protective layer to the houses. That said, if you don't want to use Minwax, feel free to use whatever washes you are comfortable with. Here we see my buildings after dipping. Nice and shiny!
7) Apply flock
After 36 hours or so, you can paint tacky glue (a nice sticky PVA from craft stores) onto the Christmas details, snowdrifts, and anwhere else you'd like to see moss or ivy. Then sprinkle your chosen flock onto the glue. I used a simple brownish green foam-based turf, as I wanted a nice fast method that would bring a dark and dreary look to the buildings.
However, if you enjoy modeling foliage, feel free to be as creative with this step as you wish. There are a multitude of products for simulating moss and ivy available to today's hobbyist, and you can mix and layer these products to achieve a range of effects.
Here is the inn after flock. For some reason I didn't apply the dirt texture to the ground snow drifts until this step.
8) Last painting
For me, this step just involved drybrushing the ground texture, though you may find details you wish to paint or places that the dip or wash didn't reach.
9) Seal your buildings
I used a spray-on matte finish and a bit of brush-on matte finish to seal these. As well as sealing in the paint, it also adds an additional layer of hold to the flock and takes away the shine that comes from using Minwax Polyshades.
10) Done!
Here are my new fantasy buildings in all their glory. The figures for scale are a 90's-era Games Workshop Elf, D&D prepainted foot soldier, and an Echidnox by Reaper Miniatures.
Final Thoughts I'm very happy with the results. The whole process was remarkably quick. By doing 5 buildings at once, I probably spent a maximum of 45 minutes of work per building! Though I didn't particularly liked the idea of working with hard porcelain buildings (the church and inn), in the end I prefer them for their crisper details. I'm considering basing these, though at this point, I like having them unbased so they can be used in city, country or farm settings.
The large vinyl cobblestone pattern mat is another Christmas house accessory. They can be routinely found for 7-10 dollars at after Christmas sales.
Also, for Mordhiem players and others who like their houses ruined and
with accessible interiors, you need to check out
Sean Patten's Necromunicon for the amazing ruined Christmas houses that first got me thinking about doing this project.
As always, your comments are appreciated and any questions are welcome.
— Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member
