Fenestration, Part Deux. . .

In the midst of adding the suggested wondows and doors to the town orphanage this afternoon.

After completing a reasonably good half-timbered effect --  achieved through a combination of brown magic marker, olive green crayon, and mid-brown colored pencil -- on the four model buildings that required it, it's time to suggest those carefully traced windows and doors with the addition of some equally careful brushwork.  This time with diluted acrylic Burnt Umber.  I've done this with water before on earlier buildings, but you risk the color running everywhere.  

This time, I'll use more viscous acrylic glazing medium (pictured above), which thins out colors, makes them quite a bit more translucent, and enables you to maintain a fair degree of control over the paint while still drying pretty quickly.  Above, you'll see the results, minus the tiny bits on the dormer and circular window, which await their wash of translucent brown.  Black, to me, looks too stark, and gray is either too dark, or too light.  A diluted brown, to the point of becoming a translucent glaze, suggests a shadowy interior in a more convincing way I think.

This method of fenestration is very similar to how Charles S. Grant renders windows and doors on his more recent model buildings.  Hence the merest suggestion of windows and doors, which imparts a rather stylized look to everything.  Nevertheless, the buildings have the right shape, profile, and proportions more or less.  They also have reasonably accurate coloring.  They will function as an appropriate 'backdrop' for the armies of Stollen and its arch enemy the Electrate of Zichenau, without distracting from the 25-30mm units.  The card and balsa structures are vastly underscale in relation to the figures, of course, but they are large enough to look "right" without dominating available tabletop space.  

The dozen structures occupy approximately two square feet of table space, less if moved closer together.  They can easily be used to represent a rather large and prosperous 'town', split into various configurations to represent smaller towns or villages, and/or mixed with the two dozen or so other wargaming built up areas I've cobbled together since December 2006-January 2007.  Hmmm. . .   Maybe I should start building casinos and hotels?

So, that's where things stand today, the first official day of Summer 2017.  Time for all night bonfires, inebriated  naked dancing in the woods, the drunken orgies that invariably follow, and an apparent inability to recall any of it by late the next morning.  Um, yeah.  Right.  The all night bonfire sounds kind of nice though, but I'll leave the other activities to our friends in the Scandinavian and Nordic countries!  I am, after all, over 50 now, happily married, a parent, out of shape, and repressed.  Just give me a good book and allow me to climb into a crisply made bed by 9pm most nights, and I'm happy.  Still, what might've been, eh?

We are, returning to the subject at hand, edging ever closer to finishing everything up with the Baltic German town center, calling the project done, and moving back to some painting of actual toy soldiers.  Fear not, however, a few small detail surprises are coming once all of the windows and doors (and there are M-A-N-Y. . .  Whew!) are painted in.  The use of a new, angled  #4 flat bristled brush like the one above really helps to stay neatly within the lines though.  I recommend it should the model-house bug bite you.

-- Stokes