Terrain Tuesday 2 - Finished Barn and build log

Hi All,

Well in the first installment I showed you some river sections and the Wargames Terrain book. I then promptly finished building this barn from a White Dwarf article.

I had started building this back sometime around 1990 and had carried it around with me between 4 states and several house/ apartment moves. I'm not sure where my White Dwarf issues are but I found a copy of the Barn article here. According to DJK's Fantasy World, the barn was in Issue 140. He also lists other projects, but seems to be missing the cottage and Inn and stables issues.

Anyway on to the build.

So here we go. A project started in the early 90's. Why I stopped here and never finished it I can't really be certain.

Printed copy of the original article. I wanted to refresh my memory on the construction of the roof and see what colors were used to paint it. On thing that became immediately obvious was that the print out of the template was smaller than my actual building. I vaguely remember something about enlarging the templates from the Cottage article, but I could find no evidence for that in this article.

So I measured the actual model and brought out my era bag of scrap terrain materials. In addition to carting around the models, I had also carted around a garbage bag filled with foam core, construction paper, mat board and balsa wood.

I briefly equivocated about making the interior playable, but decided this building had been left unbuilt for too long and had not been put together for interior play.

Again from memory I seemed to recall using wood glue to put it together. This was a more recent purchase. The set time was not fast enough and I couldn't figure out a way to weigh down the roof bits so they would stick correctly.

Hot glue gun to the rescue. It was a little tricky, and I did eventually have to carve out some overage with an exacto knife.

I found, before I glued it down, that my lean to roof was a tad too large. So I excised 5mm.

Roof substructure on!

My cellphone decided not to rotate this picture, but I cut out a chunk of card and made 1cm wide lines on it. I then cut the strips with a snap blade box cutter and left a couple of 2cm wide strips for the roof crown. The article gives different widths. I forget what they are, but I didn't like them.

I then started hand cutting shingles with said box cutter. You can use the strips with notches cut in them to represent tiles or you can cut individual tiles. They did the latter in the article and I had done it previously on the cottage.

I quickly used up my first batch of tiles. By the way, gluing them on is a great project for sitting and watching tv with the family. You know, so they don't think you're trying to avoid them.

We're not going to run out of tiles this time.

Breaking out the paper cutter for full production mode. My cuts aren't quite as accurate, but it goes way faster.

Et viola! Remember to leave a couple of double wide strips. I got over zealous and only left myself one.

I also tried my tin snips to cut the individual tiles. Works a treat. Much faster and I didn't have any problem with tearing like I did on occasion with the box cutter.

Always remember the old adage, "measure twice, cut once." My barn door was a hair too small.

Roof on, door still too small.

My collection of aged balsa. I save everything.

Fixed Barn door with planks etched in and cross planks. I just used a sculpting tool I had handy to gouge some lines in the balsa sheet. I should also add that I used Aileen's Tacky glue to put the doors on. It lives up to it's name and just sticks things in place better from the get go. I did have to use a toothpick to clean up some overage though.

The lean to door. I should have used card or thinner balsa for the cross bracing. Oh well. You can also see the ground work I added. On to paint.

Black base coat. I brushed it on and had some trouble working the paint into all the nooks and crannies.

Paints used for the body of the barn. The original article said to dry brush with Bestial Brown, Elf Grey, and Skull White. I don't think I have any of those colors left so I had to improvise. I used Nutmeg for Bestial Brown, Rain Grey for Elf Grey (which was later changed to Codex Grey? I couldn't seem to find an example on the internet.) And Drizzle Grey for Skull White. I tend to use a very light grey in place of white.

For the roof you were supposed to do a dry brush of Moody Blue followed by an Enchanted Blue highlight. I did successive dry brushes of Midnight, Navy Blue and Blue Heaven

For the ground work my normal Earth Brown, Territorial Beige, Desert Sand combo.

I then added flock and static grass after varnishing the whole thing. Done.

I hope this inspires you to pull out an old abandoned project or maybe try your hand at one of these classic designs.

Happy building and painting!