Finishing an old terrain project

So I've had the CNC Workshop church sitting around on my terrain shelf for like three years now. I bought it, built it, sprayed most of it with GW Roughcoat, and then couldn't decide how to roof the damn thing. After taking a whole pile of pictures with it for yesterday's battle report, I figured it was about time to finish it up. I had tinkered with thatching the roof, but I didn't think that'd make a whole lot of sense in the desert, plus I already had a bunch of wood slats handy. Here's how it started out:

Slat roofing is pretty much as easy as it gets, and I got lucky- the roof on the entryway was just the right size to fit nice and even without any overhanging sticks. This was pretty much the only part that fit that neatly.

The tricky part about the roof was fitting around the belltower. With shingled roofing, like on my Flying Tricycle buildings, you have some room to fudge any minor fit issues, since they overlap. With the slats, everything has to fit at least close to flush or it'll look funny. I initially started laying slats from the top of the roof down, but as I hit the bottom of the belltower, I realized I was going to run into trouble, with the roofline under the tower being about half a slat out of the pattern. I ended up redoing it with a slat under the belltower edge, then working my way up and down from there, leaving a small gap at the top that would be capped off later. Throughout the process, I tried to keep the spacing fairly irregular, using slats cut to different lengths to keep it visually interesting.

Checking ahead this time, I found that the tower roof was just a hair longer than an even set of slats, but since I planned ahead, I was able to use a bit of extra spacing across the whole section to eat the extra space.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/conspyre/5155945282/in/set-72157619404354418/
Starting with slats flush to the top and bottom of the roof, I started laying in pieces to fill in the middle, adding a tiny bit of extra space between slats in order to take up the quarter-slat of extra space.

With the guides in place, it was a simple matter of filling in the gaps to finish it off.

With the roof laid down, all that was left was to cap off the roof with one horizontal slat, to cover the peak of the roof, and deal with a few warped slats.

A few drops of glue and some patience (while watching a little TV on Hulu) got them sorted out. I like a bit of irregularity in the roof, but obviously the lifted edges in the photo are a little much.
With the roof done, there were still a couple of details to attend to. The kit is designed with a big crucifix on the back of the belltower. Given that it gets used mostly for Warmachine and Warhammer Fantasy, two settings where Catholicism doesn't have a whole lot of sway, something had to be done about it.

A quick trip to Michaels netted me a half-dozen wooden discs about 1.5" across, for the princely sum of $1.30. Craft stores are awesome, and these feel like the kind of things that may come in handy later.


The other issue that remains is the windows. CNC Workshop likes cutting out windows. On their village buildings, that's not so bad, as they have interiors, but for my church, they either just look dark, or show off the tan table underneath the building. Once I get some paint on this thing, I'm planning on gluing paper inside the building, colored to look like stained glass. The last part I leave as a question to the gentle readers- What denomination is this church? Certainly not Sigmarite, as there is a beautiful GW piece for if I decide I need a church in the Empire. Menite? Bretonnian? Generic "Church of Happiness" a la Pelor in D&D? Let me know your thoughts!

I'm not dead!

A quick post while I get photos sorted for the other posts I should write tonight-
The new Imperial Bastion is HUGE (Valten for scale, as ever).

Terrain: Oasis

I happen to have a desert table. Not a dessert table, mind you, as while delicious, it makes it tricky to play Warhammer. I've been trying to build up a good assortment of the main kinds of terrain (area, linear, buildings, woods, etc), but it's a little tricky to theme pre-made water features to make sense on my board. So I built an oasis. Unfortunately, I didn't think to take pictures during the actual construction, but it's pretty simple, I'm sure you guys can figure it out. It's a board of thin MDF (actually an old forest plate), with a foamcore second layer. The water area is cut out to allow for the depth of the water, and the trees are the Citadel Jungle Trees. A quick coat of sand, and it's on to the paint!

The first step was a quick coat of Tausept Ochre from the spraygun, which is the color I'm planning on using from now on for desert terrain, as the Desert Yellow just doesn't cover well enough.

Not much to look at yet, but I promise, the good stuff is coming. The tree trunks got a coat of P3 Battlefield Brown, as I had some kicking around, and I like the slightly more purple tone that it has as opposed to GW Scorched Brown. The foliage got a coat of GW Foundation Knarloc Green, which is usually my go-to medium green.

That pretty much gets them back to the garish look the bright green and brown plastic had, but now is the fun part. All the foliage gets a coat of GW Leviathan Purple wash. It seems like a funny color, but I really like the dark tone it gets in the veining on the leaves. While that dried, the trunks got a quick overbrush of P3 Bootstrap Brown.

Next, the base and tree trunks got a pair of drybrush rounds, first with Desert Yellow, and then with Bleached Bone. This highlights the sand, and on the trunks works similarly to the Bleached Bone drybrush on the Arcane Ruins- it highlights subtly, and tones them a bit to match the rest of the terrain set. The foliage got a quick drybrush of Knarloc Green to get them back to green, but with the darker veins.

The final touch was the actual water. Over a few days, I did three very thin pours of Woodland Scenics Realistic Water. I am slightly concerned that the second may not have set entirely, as there is still a bit of milkiness to the look of the water, but I'm giving it a few days to cure further before I give up on it entirely. Valten appears again for scale.