75th Anniversary of Battle of Monte Cassino and Northern Italy (Terrain Build)

So I’ve been away on business this week and returned to find a little package for me from Razorlab. My vector line diagram in the last update has been converted into something tangible.

As I ordered the smallest mdf base material, there wasn’t enough space for two roof panels (just the one) or a base, so I had to cut these myself. However, once done, the pieces went together very smoothly and easily – no sanding or additional work beyond a bit of PVA. So I’m very pleased with how that worked out.

I’ve cut and glued the plastic roof panels onto the mdf roof base. One thing that I didn’t think about was the 3mm thickness of the roof and my trigonometry. The thickness means the roof doesn’t sit quite flush with the building and will need a little shaved off. Not a disaster but something to take into account in future designs.

For the paint, I’m going to try a hull red base for the roof and then layer on some fiery orange followed by elf flesh. For the walls, I think I’ll try elf flesh mixed with some off white to brighten it up. All paints from Vallejo and I’ll apply through the air brush. Before hand, I’ve given everything a grey primer.

I’ve also painted up my hand cut test house as well to try out some techniques and to also see how the pva/filla mix works out.

As an experiment, I’ve also lightly sprayed on some green around the bottom of the buildings to give the impression of moss/mold.

Now for the doors and windows. For the shutters, I’ve just cut out green card and glued these in place. For the doors, the cut outs from the frames were included and I just cut out card to glue over the top and then glued the door back into place. In hind sight, I could have just not cut anything out and glued a card door on the top but at least I have the option of having the door open now!

So overall, given the limited amount of effort involved, I’m quite pleased with the results from Razorlab. I like the pva/filla coating I gave to the hand cut building, so I’ll take this approach with my next builds.

I now need to make some more to build a small hamlet. One small problem is the lack of uniformity in the buildings in a Tuscan town, so no designing just one building and replicating a lot of times. I’m going to need a lot of different designs to get the look right. I’ll also need a small church with tower as well as a separate bell tower as well.

Time to crack open the vector line software again and start designing.