The Medieval Village Grows

I recently finished a few more buildings, bridges and fences for my medieval town. These pieces were made from old porcelain Christmas village buildings and accessories — a great source of material for cheap conversions!

The bridges were a bit of a problem: they weren't wide enough for 25mm bases. I fixed this by using a hammer to break one side out of each bridge section. The smaller bridge broke completely apart, but this kind of hard porcelain breaks in large parts and it was easy to reassemble with superglue.

I then filled the hollow cavities with newspaper, hardened the top with a bit of superglue and applied the construction sand.

I can't say enough good things about construction sand. Sold in bags to be used as ballast, it has all kinds of bits in it that add some irregularity to the texture. My batch had strange red and white stones and some pieces of what appeared to be pottery!

The steps for finishing were as follows for the bridges and buildings.

• Paint for touchups and brown where the flock will go.
• A nice brushing of Minwax Polyshades Tudor — I use this as a brush-dip for many of my figures, but on buildings I call it "instant grimdark!" 
• Drybrush over the ballasted areas. 
• Flocking — This time I used the coarse foliage flock, and the results are more dramatic than the finer variety used previously. 
• Seal the flock with hardware store matte spray. 
• Apply a couple of layers of brush-on matte varnish to all non-flocked surfaces to get rid of the shine.

Here are the finished bridges.

I also did a set of stone walls. The green tint on one is the results of accidentally grabbing the green spray paint instead of the matte spray. Oh well, it doesn't look too bad!

I also finished three more buildings. This farmhouse illustrates one of the nice things about porcelain houses. They have many different angles and sections that would take a long time to scratchbuild.

 This blue house was a cheap find at a resale shop.

It was quite cheap becuase it had a broken top on the widows perch. However, a little card and some flocking and no one will be the wiser!

This last townhouse is not bad from the front, but looks a bit more fantasy/medieval from the back where I pasted a plastic warhammer castle door over the light bulb hole.

Here is my entire village is arranged for a potential game.

One reason I won't be adding any more buildings is that, right now, they all fit nicely into one Rubbermaid tub. Six of them fit into the bottom, which has been sectioned off with double thick corrugated cardboard.

This top section made from a bit of flexible foam and the cover for a printing paper box holds the last two buildings as well as the bridges and fences.

Now my town is complete! I will be adding a few city walls made from a toy castle, but that will be all. It's likely that this town get some use soon — starting in a few weeks, Chicago Skirmish Wargames will be spending a few months playing an extended fantasy campaign using the Song of Blades and Heroes ruleset. Look for lots of great battle reports this summer!

— Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames member