The big day looms and today is the big set-up day where we lay out the table to check for all the small detail we have forgotten. That will be keeping me busy from now up to Thursday night when we load up Lard Mobile 2 and prepare for launch.
Yesterday saw me focused on completing Le Flammand Rose for my Norman village high street. Readers will recall that this piece was an MDF model by Charlie Foxtrot Models, but I decided to do my usual job and personalise it a bit in order to make a really nice off-the-peg model into something unique. Please excuse me for recapping slightly here, but a lot of blogging water has passed under the bridge since we last looked at these. More on that in a moment.
Here is our “naked” model of La Brasserie as it comes straight from the pack (after simple assembly).
And here is how I tarted it up with some additional shutter and a tiled roof.
I decided that in order to add further texture to the model, I’d paint it with a mix of oil and acrylic paint. This potentially led too a major distaster as the oil paint took AGES to dry. I baked it in the oven for seven hours, but it emerged just as tacky as when it went in. Then, fortunately, we had two dry and very sunny but windy days where I just left the building outside and, at last it reached the point where I could at kleast describe it as “nearly dry”. And that’s as good as I think it’s going to get…
Here you can see that the building was painted a grotty blue colour. I undercoated the shutters with grey and then painted them white. I never try to paint stuff like this perfectly, I take the view that one is attempting to give an impression from a distance as opposed to rendering a perfect likeness. Life is a lot quicker and easier if one takes that view.
I wanted to add a little local colour, so I copied an advert which I found on the web. Naturally the spelling error is entirely intentional and merely there to provide an ice-breaking talking point for those awkward wargaming moments. Ahem. I used the structure of the advert to try to disguise the breaks in the model where you can remove roof/first floor to put toys inside. The worst bit of doing this was that once I had painted it, I distressed it with sandpaper. It was a bit of a heart-in-mouth moment, but again it does give the tired and worn with age look which typifies old French buildings.
I added a new frontage from card as my old chum Sidney asked me to name the place after one of his old stomping grounds in Hull during the torrid years of his youth. I translated the name to French and superglued that over the original frontage. I can just see Sidney standing in the doorway, possibly shedding a tear in inclement weather.
If course a real winner with this model is the fact that it fits in so nicely with my other French buildings:
So, to celebrate the new venture on the high street, I painted up some odds and sods to add to the ambience of a Norman summer. Bounteous natural products laid out on the cobbles for the French housewife to make her selection.
I picked these up on eBay, but I honestly cannot recall what I searched for. I THINK I simply searched for “!:48” to see what came up. Whoever makes these resin models also has the equivalent for North Africa with all sorts of smashing bits which would grace any 8th Army or Afrika Korps game. Not exactly cheap, this lot came to about fifteen quid. However, I thing that small detail like this adds a lot to a game. They will be ideal from Roman times to the present day, so I reckon it was money well spent.
Oh, I nearly forgot. I also added another completed Corgi Sherman to my collection. Here it is, among friends and enemies.
I thought maybe I could crew them with middle-aged men and make a film about them!