Ruined Roman villa for Saga part 2

Those Romans built well

The foam card is much too smooth and slick to be painted on directly.  I needed some texture.  Lucky for me I now know about texture paste which I covered the entire building with inside and out to simulate plaster.  Once the texture paste was on I used an old brush to add some small ridges/bumps/etc.  Nothing too dramatic as that would break the illusion that a 28mm scale person had hand rendered this building.  After all they have small hands.  Again this was left overnight to dry properly.

Good enough for Time Team?

Now it was time for some paint.  I'm sure that all this terrain making is a subconscious way that my brain working out ways to use an airbrush.  With this much surface to cover I went for the cheap $3 craft paints.  I did a base coat of off white mixed with a small amount of brown to get the aged/dirty building look.  The first mix was a bit yellow so I repeated it to get what I wanted.  I found it was hard to get the colour right as every re-coat takes a few layers to really cover the previous, so you are always getting a blend of the old and new.  With the base coat done I then did a brown mud splatter around the outside base of all the building.  This was to show the gradual ruination of the building.  There would be a lot of rubble added later so I wanted to get the brown in there before I started gluing on the rubble.

On the inside of the walls I went for a dark maroon just like the (Hollywood) Romans did.  I used masking tape to get a nice straight line that later I would dirty and weather.  However I only put on one piece of masking tape.  This meant some of the wall above the masking tape wasn't covered and afterwards had in parts a small amount of red misting.  Another re-coat in the off-white/brown mix fixed that up.  So in future mask everything you don't want paint on.  On the top of the walls I painted them a red/brown as that is what the brick colour would most likely be.  The top of the walls were then dry brushed to lighten it slightly.  Once all the painting is done I planned to add some flock/lichen to represent foliage growth on top of the walls.

Just add missile troops

To age the building I used Army Painter Strong Tone wash all over the building inside and out.  After all the roof has fallen in so things should be pretty dirty all over.  The walls were then dry brushed back up with the off ivory and then ivory with some white added.  Also the partial wooden floor was painted brown/black and then dry brushed lighter with a dark brown followed by a lighter brown.

Mosaic floor

For the floors I wanted to have them as mosaics (much like the article in WGI described).  Searching the web I found some appropriate pictures that I re sized and then printed out in black/white to test for fit.  Some more resizing to get the borders looking right was done before I printed the colour copies.  I used spray adhesive as I thought that pva craft glue would make the paper soggy and wrinkled.  The spray worked very well and some of the spray soaked into the paper to and gave it a very firm surface.

Front entrance pavers

For the front entrance way I used a sheet of plastic brick work that I found in the model railway section of Hobbyco.  This was repainted and aged already so it just needed to be cut out to size and the front chopped up a bit to show the outer brick / pavers breaking away.