Late on parade today, but I have been busy with a paint brush, largely slapping green paint on jungle vegetation but also getting three of my jungle houses complete.  So where to start?
Paint.  It’s boring to watch other people paint stuff, especially when there is no good tips or exciting techniques on offer, so I will keep this quick.  This is green paint.  As you can see it is a pretty generic colour which I actually mixed using some cheap kids acrylic paint (don’t use good model paint for this stuff) and a dollop of brown house paint.  Remember, don’t try anything clever with tones and variations for different plants, that comes later.  At this stage this is just an exercise in slapping on green paint.

I find the easiest way to do this is to grasp the base and put the palm tree foliage on a flat surface and then paint the underside of the leaves first.  Like this.
 

When that’s done, turn the right way up and do the tops of the trees and the standing foliage. When they are done they look like this:

As you can see, I have also painted the spikes green so that that will look like fronds when the plants are attached.  Don’t worry about slapping green paint around a bit, in the next stage we will tidy this up.  That’s all with the jungle today as that needs to dry properly overnight, so on to the buildings.
Just some snaps here.  The buildings with tin roofs are Sarissa Precision models, the one with plant fibre roof is Warbases.  I was originally planning on adding some vegetation to these bases, but there isn’t much spare room for such fripperies.  As a result I will be added somne plants to the garden bases that I am going to make for them  As it is, I just added some flock around the outside, keeping the ground under the houses bare.
When modelling and painting  buildings I like to think about who would live there and then try to create a model that runs with the narrative.  Here I wanted buildings that would be suitable in wild jungle or on more organised plantations and villages.  The end result was to try to combine old and new together in a plausible manner, hence when I went with modern corrugated iron I then tempered that with some traditional thatch.
 

The Warbases model I probably took the most chances on, going really native with the plant fibre roof, but I rather like the end result.  The roof, combined with the additional texture on the walls, which I attempted to highlight (literally) with the paint job, gives me the result I wanted, that of a real out-back jungle hut that one might come across after hours of trekking through virgin jungle.  The bloke who lives there would probably emerge in a loin cloth and fire a poison dart at you, but equally it could be a poorer worker’s house on the edges of a village.

Next was the Sarissa “Planked Style Village House” from their Far East range.Nothing really to say here other than it is a great kit.

 
And then the Sarissa “Small Village House”.  As you can see with all of these buildings, I have gone for a worn, greyish look.  We wargamers do have a nasty habit of painting wood buildings brown whereas in reality aged wood turns grey with age.  With this I added a tiny bit of colour to suggest a more well-to-do peasant who probably has aspirations to own a 72″ flat screen TV and a surround sound system.


And that’s it for today.  New Years Eve celebrations tonight mean that tomorrow will be a bit of a lottery. Hopefully I’ll be back with some more news, or I may just be nursing a hangover.  Time will tell…
May I take this opportunity to wish you all a very Happy New Year and, to our Scottish chums, a happy Hogmanay.