Ruined Roman villa for Saga part 3

View from above

To show the ruined state of the villa (and to hide the messy bits) I wanted to add a fair amount of rubble to the building.

Front door

All these plaster rocks were glued in multiple layers around the building over a few days.  Finally I used a mixture of olive green scatter, mid green static grass and various grass tufts and flower tufts to green up the building and hide some of the bad bits.  I also made a creeping vine from some lichen.

Open side room

The whole villa took some time but much of that was trial and error on the wall colours with lots of repainting.  Next time I would make up a small scrap of wall and trial colours there until I was happy.

The landing

Having to repaint the entire villa every time I changed my mind/made a mistake got a bit annoying in the end.  The mosaics turned out better than expected and all the greenery blended in well.

The hallway

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.

Ruined Roman villa for Saga

N.B. Apologies for the fuzzy pictures in this post.  My camera was on the wrong setting at the time.

A very white villa

Recently I've subscribed to Wargames Illustrated which the wife rightly describes as terrain porn.  Every issue leaves me with a overwhelming desire to make some new piece of terrain or a new game board, etc.  In one issue there was a brief article on making a ruined roman villa for use in Saga games.  As soon as I saw it I wanted my own.  Plus it gave me an excuse to make a decent sized building which I hadn't done for some time.

Voodoo pins into the building

In order to get the scale of the building right I made a floor plan on a piece of paper and drew the rooms.  Then using a 28mm figure on a 25mm base I could make sure the doorways were wide enough and the rooms could fit the right number of figures.  As far as room layout and design I pretty much copied the design from the WGI article.  It was a nice layout after all.  Once I had the size of the floor plan I cut out a base from 3mm masonite (Whitecoat) which has on one side a white covering which makes painting much easier.  No need to undercoat or seal the masonite.

Always make sure the doors are wide enough

The walls are made of 5mm foam board which makes the construction very quick.  Since the top of all the walls were going to be irregular I laid out the sheet of foam board and drew the top wall line for the each room in one go, with spacing for the width of the walls.  This meant that each corner would match up exactly.  Much easier than trying to cut each wall out separately and measure and match later.  Cutting out irregular curves like the top of wall is best using a sharp hobby knife and holding it almost vertical.  That way the cuts are small and you can follow a curve easily.   I used PVA glue to put together the building.  Also I use dress making pins to hold the walls together while the glue dries.  This means you can make the entire structure in one go and let it dry overnight.  To keep the foam board walls at right angles I copied the Paul Davies (of WGI fame) method of using Lego bricks to make a right angle wall, pushed the foam board next to the Lego and thus keep the corner at 90 degrees.

The front entrance way

Looking at the piece the next day I decided that the high corner I had made in one room was too high, almost a three storey building in scale.  Such a high wall would dominate and make storage an issue.  More knife work and it was cut down to size.  I also put in a small first floor so missile troops have somewhere to shoot from.  Every ruined building needs a platform for the bow/rifle/zapgun troops to fire from.  I used more 5mm foam card as supports and a piece for 1mm plastic card as the floor.  This plastic card was then covered with wooden craft sticks painted to become wooden floor boards.

First floor ledge