Spring Clean Maurice

When considering my approach to towns/villages etc. I decided early on that this would NOT be a task of creating massively details, perfect representations of buildings. There are commercial manufacturers that produce excellently detailed models. Instead I took the view that these are simple gaming approximations, and so a more prosaic approach was the way to go.

With that in mind, I used balsa as the basic building shape cutting balsa strips of different sizes into 30/35 mm lengths. These were glued together combined to create the basic “house” shape.

During my holiday I came across some wood veneers and in my mind I thought that these could form the elements of ‘color’ for the buildings. So with three or four different packs, I set about cutting up the balsa and creating some basic shapes.

The bases were cut from some MDF in generic square/oblong shapes within the min/max parameters of the Maurice rules. These are to my mind smaller bases than you might expect, but two ormolu can be combined to make larger “cities” if that’s necessary. But bear in mind the fighting will not take place  these bases, so “full sized” houses are not necessary any way.

I had also picked up some embossed paper which I think is actually scaled for “N” gauge railway buildings, but I used this as a ‘standard’ base material indicating this was an urban setting – although that should be obvious.

So the basic town base was roughly square with a ‘stone’ effect

The buildings were made by gluing different veneers to the balsa bases mixing up the different wood finishes in a random manner.

These basic house models were glued onto the bases, and then they were finished off by flocking some grass on the edges and adding a few small trees to ‘decorate’ the final base.

Pictures should show the final look.  (The trees were made from cotton buds, PvA glue and sand/flocks)