From StuartL - Dutch Village House

Taking a break from painting up batches of infantry and fantasy beasties, I decided to do a spot of terrain this week. As well as a lead mountain and a plastic mountain, I have a growing pile of MDF terrain that I need to reduce a little. MDF is not the best material for terrain, but it is fairly cheap, lightweight, and with a bit of extra effort it can be made to look pretty decent. This particular piece is from Sarissa Precision.

After assembling the building, I painted the walls with a textured paste from Liquitex. This served to give the walls a rougher finish (since MDF can look a bit flat) and sealed the wood so that it didn't drink up all the paint. The walls were painted white, the brickwork in a reddish brown and all of the woodwork in a pale brown. After that everything was washed with watered down brown paint.

Once the wash was dry, I repainted the walls in white, added the blue colours for the shutters and doors and added some different shades of red, brown and grey to the bricks and tiles. All of this work was done using spare foam from some mini trays rather than a brush. By dabbing the paint on, parts of the original colour and the wash were left showing through. Using a square piece of foam, it was easy enough to control where the paint went on the walls and woodwork. For the bricks and tiles I used a torn up piece of foam for more irregular patches.

The vines going up the walls are simply a mix of flock, PVA glue and green paint, allowed to dry and then highlighted with a brighter green.

Due to the surface area to cover, it took a few hours work to get it all done, but it was surprisingly easy to do. Though I'm not an expert on architecture, I guess this building could be used for Napoleonic games right up to modern day scenarios, so I hope to get some use out of it. I have another one of these houses to assemble in the pile, so I may have to do that sometime soon.

For points scoring, the house is roughly 6" by 7" by 5.5", close enough to the standard painting challenge terrain 'cube' to add 20 points to my score, bringing me up to 799.5 points.