So in a move that should surprise exactly none of you who are regular readers of this blog – I repainted the two sets of these huts that I reviewed the other day. So this is what I did….
With the first set, I repainted them almost entirely – repainting the exterior walls and then painting the interior walls in the same colours. I kept one lighter and one darker, more or less keeping them in broadly similar tones to how they were originally.
The second set I kept in their original colours as a base before adding the weathering, and found a close enough match of the outside walls to paint the interior walls before weathing those as well in a different manner.
All four buildings then had different combinations of thinned Army Painter Strong Tone, Soft Tone and Mid Brown added – with the white building getting thinned Vallejo Light Gray Wash instead.
I also repainted all of the doors and window coverings on all four sets so that both sides would match. Finally, three of the four were drybrushed with Vallejo Bonewhite while the other with Vallejo Silvergrey.
The roofs were all given thinned-down washes, again using combinations of thinned Army Painter Dark Tone, Strong Tone, Soft Tone and Mid Brown – and with some drybrushing of Vallejo Stonewall Grey and Silvergrey. They looked okay, but there was something still not quite right about them. I then went back over them, stippling in combinations of Dark and Strong Tone to give them an uneven, weathered look that just reads much more naturally. You can see how much of a difference adding that made in the pic above – stippled, unstippled, stippled, unstippled.
Finally, I darkened the lower walls by drybrushing with a mix of Vallejo Panzer Grey and Dark Rust – and then everything was sprayed with Matte varnish, and then it was just a matter of waiting until dry to take these photos! Then when I got to the point of taking the photos, I was really unhappy with the lighting, so ended up putting this post off for a couple more days so I could get hold of some new lights for when I need to photograph models in larger settings on the gaming table rather than just in the light box.
As noted in the previous post on these, I have no intention of using these in games set in the Pacific or ‘Nam/Asia, and instead these will be used in my Flames of War games (and eventually, Team Yankee/World War III moderns) as European Thatched Roof buildings, because amazingly, simple thatched roof buildings are something found pretty much worldwide.
While the doors and windows on these models appear to be made of something resembling bamboo if you look up and reeeeal close, there’s also no reason that these couldn’t simply be simple thatched shutters and door coverings in a European building – or possibly even North African buildings in some locales. For European games, I think they’ll work well as either rustic rural homes or as aditional buildings on a farm-type property as the photos in this post show – much easier to visualise when they’re on a nice mat with something else like roads nearby, even without trees, hills and all the rest…
Azazel's Bitz Box. 