Building of the Week - The Santa Clause

Chris ran an excellent Santa Clause this year though I was struggling with what to do for my target. His painting style was going t be difficult for me to copy and basing was far different from what is my norm I knew I could be providing a less than good match. However he did have some rather nice buildings and I thought I might have a chance of doing something that would fit.

This is a MDF kit that I have managed to loose who makes it but I decided t have some fun with it. The outer walls I coated in Reeves Coarse texture gel leaving the areas of bare brick showing. The inner walls I applied Reeves Gesso primer fr a smoother but not smooth finish. 

Then it was just a basic paint job adding smoke damage and some dirt to the outer walls after using a few different whites to get a more realistic aged look. The inside walls I tried to get a mixed room look without limiting it to much to one period.

I also had some wooden and terracotta bricks I added to the model scattering them around and dropping others down the chimney. Inside is a 28mm figure for scale.

In reality it was not quite as bright as the images look. The windows and sills had to be attached which were easy to do in fact I had no issues at all. It did come with some rubble bits but they looked exactly what they were, bits of board meant to look like rubble, not a jagged edge to be seen.

Several floor area's had tiling but I added sawdust and inked it to make it nice and grubby. I also added a few card roof tiles here and there to add to the clutter without cutting into figure placement space. Last off I used very watered down black paint and splattered the walls to give a sooty effect to the inside of the walls and make it yet more grubby.

It also came with a roof section that was crying out to have tiles attached. I was lucky enough to have a sheet of Warbase tiles in hand s it was just a case of cutting sections out and layering them up on the wooden frame and adding the odd mispositioned one to show them falling out of place, had lots of fun with that. Pre cutting I painted them as a page starting dark grey and working to light through dry brushing.

Last off was the outer base work, flocking and bush planting and I had a great time building it up. Fortunately it made it to Spain without incident and seems t have gone down well.