Not much happened yesterday as the Bacchanalian celebrations took centre stage on Lard Island.  However, I did get to have a quick dabble with the Jungle hut as the potatoes came to the boil.
The issue with any MDF building, no matter how good they are is that they are rater two dimensional due to their flat nature.  In Europe, I like to add some depth and texture by plastering them.  Here in the Jungles of Malaya and Burma I couldn’t do that, so I wanted some way to make the wood and plant fibre structures stand out a bit.  The key words here are “a bit”.  It would be possible to over egg the pudding and go mad, adding all sorts of fibres to the outside, but my own experience is that less is often more.
With that in mind, I decided that an odd bit of added paper would do to simulate an uneven weave of plant fibre walls and that adding a frame would give more depth.
For the first bit of the job I used thick paper.  As can be seen this was a VERY minimalist approach but I think it will be sufficient to trick the eye into believing that there is more detail present then their is.
Next, I added the wood frame using cornflake packet.  Here I attempted to cut straight lines, but that was sufficient to see them come out in a wobbly enough manner to look like they were constructed by the native population with a limited access to modern tools.  If you tried to cut the cardboard in a wiggly manner it would be over-pronounced and look daft.

As can be seen, I also extended this idea to the woven shutters over the windows, but here I simply used the heavy paper.

With this done, I washed the whole thing with heavily watered down PVA glue.  As this dries some of the more wobbly bits that have occurred due to the paper expanding with straighten out.  As you can see, I have restricted the detail to the bits that can  be seen in normal circumstances.  I haven’t added any detail around the roof eaves as you won’t see this.
At this stage I am looking at this thinking “That looks bloody awful”.  However, experience tells me that once the undercoat is on everything knits together and I think the added bits will make the model look more real.  That said, this is definitely an experiment so I could be utterly wrong.  We shall see.
Today is Boxing Day and I’m off with the family for a long tramp across the fields to try to walk off some of yesterday’s excess.  I do hope to get some more work done on the jungle later today but I have not been aided in this by the realisation that my air brush is buggered.  I took it apart to clean it and now the trigger action doesn’t work.  So it will ne a manual job with a big brush.  Ouch…