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A Quaint Little Villa
Here is a
nice little craft kit. Pretty simple to make, and pretty easy to find on sale at
your FLCS. I saw a stack of them on sale for a buck a piece, but realized that
the scale of the buildling wouldn't work for 28mm minis. Then I realized that it
really didn't matter what the printed design was, or what the scale was intended
to be. More important than what it was is what it could be. That is obivously a
deep, philosophical point as it uses the past, present, and future tenst of the
state of being verb all in one sentence. :)
Well, this
wasn't much of a stretch. Pretty much just make it and paint it. By adding a
balsa wood door, I impose a scale on the building that matches what I want. Not
bad for a quick filler building. A more ambitious person might fill in the gaps
and cracks with caulk or spackle before painting, to give a nicer more uniform
appearance.
This is the
first variant I came up with. Just pull the two pieces apart. Now you have a
little cottage and a tower. The tower seemed to need a little more, so I added a
ledge between the two (remember, my scale, not the piece's scale) floors. You
can also see a little texturing on the roof, which I did by putting some self
adhesive foam shapes on to a wood block. Again, primitive yet functional. And
the roof patterns look much better from a more natural gaming angle.
This one
requried a little cutting of the roof to get the tower at the other end, but all
in all, it was pretty simple and makes a nice variant.
The obivous
follow up to two towers on one cottage is two cottages on one tower. Especially
when you have an extra cottage left over from the last one.
And, of course,
anything worth doing, is worth overdoing. This one required a small piece of
thin cardboard to bridge across the two towers. There's also a lot of white
space you could use if you were making a more detailed building rather than a
generic space filler.
Lastly,
doubling up shouldn't be limited to whole pieces. here you see some additional
examples of simple texturing (I have a couple other ones, too, like brick and
dots). For some reason, these guys also got hardware on the doors ... just a
little puff paint (that liquid latex for decorating t-shirts found in your
FLCS).
So, what
do you do with them? Well, here's a little Medieval village layout. Fantasy in
theme because of the peanut butter jar lid/cd/miscelaneous miniature fountain in
the town square. You may notice a non-villa piece in there ... a dollar
birdhouse from the FLCS.
A slight
change of scene and some different statuary allows this to be a mid to late 20th
century Eastern European building. It's amazing how a little self adhesive foam
star turns these all american green army men into dirty pinko commies. Also a
couple rounded tower like birdhouses.
White marble
statues and some printed paper on 6"x6" wood blocks transforms the timbre of the
villas yet again. I suppose the imposing "my building is bigger than yours"
helps, too. Great Hall? Church? Patron's Manor? Nope. Just a "stable" birdhouse,
this time weighing in at $5.00!
Oh, I almost forgot. The stable roof
pieces (and door) are hinged, presumably to fill it with birdseed. Also nice for
stationing snipers.
So, here's
the whole outlay, in a rather dense layout over a 4'x4' area. I usually use this
for a 4'x6' field, or even a 4'x8' or 5'x10' with a few hedges, trees and
statues thrown in for good measure. The coolest thing is if you count 'em up
that's $28, ignoring glue, paint, and a couple of scraps for doors'n'such.
This article isn't to advocate against nice, detailed terrain pieces. I have many of those as well. And paper buildings. There are a couple of very nicely done series of print and fold buildings in my inventory as well. These don't look nearly as nice as those, but markedly nicer than flat paper template cut outs. And being balsa wood, they are pretty light and reasonably durable.
I keep telling myself I am going to go back and spackle the gaps or put hardware on all the doors (the stable door was just flat originally). Then someone knocks one off the table on to the floor. I swear, slap some "cow glue" on 'er and think ... maybe later.