House making – Part 7 (Painting)

Woooow – it is long time since I have been working on my La Fière Bridge houses. I felt that now is the time to continue. I guess that I have a limit of how many figures I can paint before I have to do something else for a while, I almost did 5 squads.

I needed to do something else, so I continued on my house project. Painting a house that I built a year ago. Here are pictures of the painted walls. I still need to add the door, paint the roof, and add details such as moss and strokes of dirt from rainwater. Right now I have used pigments for mortar between the stones but after adding plaster a few places, to make it look like reparations (something the real house don’t have) I found out that I easily will be able to use the plaster as mortar and achieve a more realistic look, so I will probably go back and work on the walls again at some point.

In the lower corner to the left I have used plaster as mortar and like the look, I will probably use this on the rest of the house.

I like how the house blend into the terrain. The plaster reparations is too distinct though (more on the pictures than in real life). I will probably try to make them less dominant.

The house is made for my La Fière Bridge project. The initial thought was to make moulds of every house that I build for this project so that I easily would be able to make more french farm buildings. The idea was good but I found out that I liked to make the houses from scratch but the process of making moulds was extremely boring. And when considering that I will have 15-20 farm buildings when ready, I probably never are going to need more of them which make all the work doing moulds a bit overkill. The idea is still good and I will probably do it when I am going to build small town buildings – making moulds for roofs and all the walls minus the facades, then I will be able to do all the fun facade building and just make copies of the rest from the moulds.

See the specific house HERE!
and all post in the project HERE!

UPDATE:

I removed as much of the old plaster as possible and added a new layer all over to fill the cracks between the stones. The plaster was a bit too bright so I sprayed a thin layer of brown all over and then added pigments to make it look old – now I am pretty satisfied with the result.

The pictures can be watched in bigger size by clicking them:

House making – Part 6 (Next house)

On to the next house. The doors are missing in the pictures but has been made, so hopefully the moulds can be made tomorrow!

House making – Part 5 (Adding roof)

I have now made a mould of the roof piece. When making the roof mould I by accident placed the master on a uneven surface which gives me problems when making the cast, the resin tends to gather in one of the corners. The roof piece that comes out of that is harder to fit together with the house. It is easy to place the mould so it is plain when casting, but still it is quite irretating.

The following pictures are showing the house with added details, ready to get painted.

…and here after the primer:

House making – Part 4 (Assembling)

I made a resin cast of all wall pieces today so that I could assemble my first house (still miss the roof). I made it harder to assemble by pouring too much resin in some of the moulds, this forced me to carve and sand to make it fit. The wall pieces had some air bobbles which my test casts didn’t have… I guess they came as the resin sets really fast, I have only 2 minutes before it harden and this make me pour the resin too fast.

I will soon make a mould on the roof piece but still need to fix some details first.

And this is the two-store barn in 1/1:

House making – (mini update)

Just a quick and dirty paint test and used lots of pigments. I think it looks promising, will put more effort into paint the final houses.

House making – Part 3 (Resin test)

Yesterday I made two test with Jesmonite, the second cast was better than the first one, but none was good enough. Jesmonite was too thick to allow it to fill the mould which gave lots of air holes.

Today I was down in my local hobby shop buying some resin and made a new test – which is much better. I can see now that by sealing my master before making moulds will probably be better, and if I at the same time improve my sculpting skills it will all be a hit. :-)

Next I will try to paint this little wall section, most because I can’t resist. Then I will make some new moulds with sealed surfaces and if no new problems have occurred I will resume my work with sculpting new wall pieces at the same time that I cast the ones already made.

House making – Part 2 (Mould and Jesmonite test)

Making the first moulds. Since this pictures was taken I tried the moulds using Jesmonite, an acrylic product that is similar to plaster in many ways. The first test I did the Jesmonite was too thick to pour down into the moulds. I have made a new mix now and have to wait until tomorrow for the result of this casting.

House making – Part 1 (Battle at La Fière Bridge)

I have wanted to build my own houses for a couple of years now. I started out building them in balsa and tried using liquid rubber for making moulds. The mix wasn’t very succesful as the rubber stuck to the smaller details of my wall pieces. I guess I could have sealed the surface better before pouring the rubber over the wall pieces, but still I decided to start all over with new materials, balsa wasn’t the easiest material to work with. Later my life took on a new direction getting a family and was out of the hobby for some years. Not long ago I saw the work of Emmanuel Nouaillier and remembered my old project. Full of inspiration from Emmanuel’s splendid work I took it all up again. Now I use other materials, mainly foamboard, the moulds will be made of silicone. I will make several facades in different sizes and designs so that I can mix them to get a great variety of houses all in the typical Normandy style.

To make a good start I have chosen existing houses to be models for my farm houses – the houses in the area surrounding the bridge at La Fiére Manor. This bridge was fought for during several days in the start of the Normandy invasion. The houses will include a big Manor-like house, a chapel, a couple of farm houses plus lots of barn buildings, some stone walls and of course the bridge itself.

Finding pictures of how the houses looks today, has been quite easy, especially using Google Maps “Street view”, but still have taken me many hours. The problem is that many of the houses was damaged during the battle and when rebuilt some of them was altered, so making them true to the appearance of 1944 has not been possible for all houses, only for the houses where I have been able to find older pictures. I will change the dimension of some of the buildings to make them fit my “system” (explained further down).

Here are some overview pictures of the area and it’s houses:

This little piece of land was the scene for some of the hardest fighting during the first days of the Normandy Campaign. The bridge that was important for both the German and the allied armies was in the center of all this. The americans needed it to breach out of the beach-head, and the germans to be able to counterstrike the allied forces on the beaches – this lead to several days vicious fightings. In a fairly flat land the old stone houses became important objectives to defend against the attacks that kept coming. The white rectangle is “old” indications of the boards I planned to build to be able to play the missions (every rectangle was going to be 120mm x 60mm). Later I have found that the game board has to be bigger for several reasons. Shortening the causeway and the flooded fields is still a must, the length was 500 meters which would be 7 metres in 1/72-scale.

1. Main building of the farm called La Fière Manoir, a cool detail is the round tower on the backside of the building.
2. Small building that is built up against a stone wall on the back of the farm. The use for this house is unknown.
3. A small house in the end of the long, big barn building.
4. Extremely long barn building.
5. A small house that I guess has been the residence for workers on the farm.
6. Barn building.
7. Yet another barn building.
8. This house I don’t know what has been used for, or if it belonged to the farm or not. I do have pictures showing that windows and door openings was a bit different from today.
9. A small building on the other side of the road, probably used for animals or tools.
10. The bridge.
11. The first house in the small village, called Cauquigny, when coming from the bridge.
12. Barn building belonging to house nr. 11.
13. A small chapel with belonging graveyard and a special stone wall surrounding it. Some of the first fightings was in and around this building as US paratroopers, that was dropped on the “wrong” side of the bridge, took up a defensive battle here*. At this moment the bridge was still in the hands of the germans.
14. Yet another farm.
X. Not visible on any of this pictures is a couple of extra farm houses. This buildings will all be made out of pieces made for all the other houses.

A newer picture of the manor.

The manor shortly after the battle. Several of the houses has been damaged especially the main building.

The bend in the road to the left was where the americans put up a 57mm AT gun, the only weapon along with two bazookas that they had to defend against the german tanks.

This pics really show how cool the main building is, built on a small rise and with the old tower on the back will make this a beautiful piece on the game board.

Cauquigny, the little village from where the Germans launched their attacks on the bridge and from where they made the americans bleed when they attacked the village from the causeway.

This is how far I am with the project:

House 4

This building is extremely long. I have made it shorter, but still it is a very long building for a game board. The big opening has also been made smaller, a little bit sad but otherwise the building would be too big. The two side pieces in the top of the pictures will be used in both ends of the building which is one of the reasons to why I will make moulds of every wall piece. A few details including doors, chimney and roof still needs to be done. I have ordered some tiled plastic sheets from Wills that I will use for roof.

House 5

The small house don’t have the doors or windows done yet, but I also still have to do both the roof dormers and the roof itself.

House 7

Door and roof missing.

This is how the barn looks today, more or less the same as then.

House 11

Several parts missing on this. From the start, when the project was less ambitious I was going to use the same pieces for the front and back, but has later decided against it. Doors, roof, windows, chimneyparts and of course the new pieces for the back of the house still missing. The lower piece on the left of the picture will be re-used on the other side of the house towards the garage plus several other places and I will probably make an extra mould for this because it will also be re-used a lot on other buildings.

This is how the building looked like after the battle. When the americans launched their attack the causeway was covered by machine-gun fire from this building. The house have been altered a bit since then – today it has more windows on the front of the house. This is the only picture I have seen showing that the design of the chapel has been changed since the battle – newer pictures show the house with a big white arc up at the roof.

House 12

The barn building belonging to house 10. Few details plus the roofs missing. The two steps up to the door is some I added without knowing if there are any in real life.

How it looks today, there is not much indicating that it has been changed since the battle, but I am not sure on this. In the background the Chapel (house 13) is visible.

I am making windows that I will mould and re-produce so that they can be added to my wall pieces – in this picture only one is ready.

That’s all for now. In a short time, when pieces for the first building is finished, I will start making moulds, and the result of that will tell more of how the final look will be – not as beautiful and detailed as Emmanuel Nouaillier’s, but hopefully very nice buildings for gaming.

Some bonus info on this project:

• The pieces I make will be assembled to work as base elements in a system where I have made rules for sizes for both length and height of the buildings. In this way I will be able to re-use many of the parts and to make a great variety of buildings with as many floors as I want to add on them in the different games we will play. This system also gives the possibility to make the inside of the buildings if there is a wish to be able to put figures in the houses.
• The plan is also to make ruin parts that I can add either if the houses from the start has been damaged or if they during the game takes hits from artillery.
• This is the first batch of houses that has a typical Normandy rural design. Next I will do town houses in the best Carentan style.

* As I remember it from my memory.

Battle at La Fière Bridge – To do list

UPDATE – 12. July

Last night I finished some more US stuff. Gave the figures a dull coat this morning and this evening added weathering to the 57mm gun using oil paints and pigments.
This is all made quite quick – the quality could be better. The gun is Airfix and the level of details are not very high, but I just didn’t have the energy to build the AB Figures gun that I have – too many parts. My can of Army Painter Quickshade also seems to be too old, it just don’t do as I want to anymore, there is also started to appear bigger dark flakes of dried varnish which is very annoying when painted on to the figures.

There are lots of things to do before we will be able to play the Battle at La Fière Bridge. The biggest task will be to do the terrain. Most of the figures are painted and the vehicles I have already started on. It is stupid that I don’t have all the infantry painted already, but I started to repaint most of my figures some weeks ago. The good thing though is that more or less everything I need is bought already, so no excuses for not getting it done. This is only the 3 Skirmish Campaign scenarios… I think I will add two more from IABSM’s scenarios later, then I will need more stupid french tanks.

GERMAN STUFF
1 x Cpt. with MP40 – done
1 x Lt. with MP40 – done
1 Sgt. with MP40 – done
8 x Squad Leaders with MP40 – 6/8
23 x Riflemen – 13/23
3 x MG42 LMG teams – done
2 x MG42 HMG teams – 1/2
1 x Panzerschreck team – done
1 x Sniper – done
1 x Spotter – done
2 x Forward Observers – done
4 x Renault R35 – almost done (need weathering and decals)
1 x Kübelwagen – done
1 x Kfz. 70 truck
6-10 Suppression Markers – 1/6

US STUFF
3 x Lt. with Thompson – 2/3
4 x Sgt. with Thompson – done
6 x Squad Leaders with Thompson – done
20 x Riflemen – done
1 x BAR LMG – done
4 x .30 Cal. LMG teams – done
2 x Bazooka team – done
1 x 60mm Mortar team – done
1 x Sniper
1 x Spotter
1 x Forward Observer – done
1 x 57mm AA Gun with 3 gunners – done
6-10 Suppression Markers
1 x French civilian

TERRAIN
I am still not quite sure how I will do the terrain – if I am going for terrain boards that have everything stuck on it, like the one’s that I started do a couple of years ago (This!), or do the old usually type where hedges, houses and all stuff are terrain-pieces that can be moved around and be re-used to other games. To be honest my old board idea wasn’t a hit, I should had listen to other gamers. But still the idea about them was good, but the amount of time that I lay in those boards was way to much. There’s some really cool buildings in this scenarios and it would be sad if I only used ordinary “houses”, both the cool old farm built on a hill or the weird-looking Chapel, but also the causeway crossing through the flooded fields – this pieces are so cool that they must get special treatment. So I still don’t know how I will do it.

Battle at La Fière Bridge Project

Ok… this is a project that I started long times ago but not really getting up to speed on. By writing this post maybe I can gather my thoughts on all the different tasks that lies ahead of me making this into playable scenarios on great terrain pieces.

It all started when I was going through the different scenarios in the Skirmish Campaigns scenario book: “Normandy ’44-First Hours”. Several of the maps was so bad that I tried to find better maps other places.

In the process this battle caught my attention. Several things make it interesting, a desperate battle around one single little bridge that was equal important for both sides, one single long causeway going through a flooded field that first Germans tried to cross, then the Americans, hopeless lack of bigger tanks and very interesting terrain triggered my interest. Many days of fighting in the same small area are great when building terrain because the stuff you build can be reused several times. The houses in the area are few, so that I can build every single one of them, and because they are typical Normandy houses, I can use them to make molds so that I will be able to multiply the houses for other Normandy scenarios.

Earlier on I had bought some of the tanks that was going to be used in the battle, captured french Renault R35’s, a stupid little tank that was both expensive to buy (I needed 4 of them) and they needed som conversion to work as I wanted them to. I also had to find out how they was painted, if they had camo and what their turret numbers was. One forum in particular was very useful as members was doing a great job by looking through movies and photos to find facts on all this. Find a link to the forum together with the WIP on the tanks here!

It didn’t take long before I found a book that is covering the battle: No Better Place to Die. It is an absolute must to all like me that want’s to do scenarios of this battle. It is filled with useful information and lots of pictures that isn’t shown elsewhere. Reading this book made me very excited about the project.

Another thing that I have been doing is to plan how to do the terrain. Google Maps been very useful as their satellite photos are very detailed in this area. I have been cutting and manipulating the map to make it fit better into a tabletop format. So Right now I’m aiming for 4 pieces of terrain boards that is 60×120 cm, together that is 240×120 – if the terrain really should be downscaled to 1/72 it would probably be much bigger, but I’m not sure a bigger terrain will make the game more fun – but I’m still thinking on maybe make it 360×180 which will force me to play it another place than in my home because of the size.

This is how I at the moment want to make my terrain boards. I will skip a big part of the causeway as I’m not sure that it is needed because of the curve in the road. Click the picture to get a bigger one.

When it comes to houses I found pictures on most of them in the book I was mentioning, but also several could be found doing an internet search. But maybe coolest of all was when I found out I can use Google maps’ street view, so many cool details I discovered by doing this. The following images are all screen dumps from the Street View feature in Google Maps:

In the top right the little bridge is visible. This is probably the first view that many of the US soldiers got of the bridge. The big farm to the left was I hide out for some german soldiers that arrived the evening before. The farm itself will make a fun task to build.

This view is from a bit further down the road from where the other picture is taken only looking backwards instead. The same spot as where the road bends to the left the Americans put a 57mm AT Gun, this gun alone together with some bazookas was all that they had to stop the german tanks. The hills to the left of the road is what remains of some kind of fortress that dates back to ancient time.

This is a better view of the bridge. The fields on both sides of the causeway, from the river all the way to the treeline in the horizon was flooded by the germans which made the road the only way to cross over. The causeway does bend to the right which made the crossing a bit more safe to cross as there is not line of sight all the way down the causeway. An abandoned german truck was placed just in front of the bridge to stop the tanks from crossing. German artillery and mortar fire was hitting this area very hard for several days.

The farm seen from the bridge. It is maybe hard to see on this image because of the small size, but with Google’s Street View you get a very good idea of the how the farm is build on several different ground levels, which makes it very cool to build. This I would never know if I had just studied the pictures found in the book.

This is the first thing the german tanks saw when they passed the bend in the road. The first tank to reach this place was taken out by two bazooka teams hiding on both sides of the bride, the second tank was hit by the 57mm AT Gun. German soldiers dug in on both sides of the causeway.

In the end of the causeway on the german side of the flooded fields, looking left you see this hedgerows, so typical for the area.

Looking to the right you’ll see a house heavily defended by the germans later on when the americans try to cross the causeway. Further to the right the Chapel is seen. This too was a place where heavy fighting took place.

This image is pure gold when I am going to build the houses.

Further down the road this houses lies.

Right now I try to decide if I will use the scenarios from Skirmish Campaigns or them from IABSM. The difference is that Skirmish Campaigns scenarios are downgraded so that what was a company in real life are platoons in this scenarios. Skirmish Campaigns also use what they call “Variable Attachments” which is a roll you make to see what extra units you get, this can be units that are known to be in the area but not necessary in the battle, extra artillery or can be civilians that assist as if they where scouts. This make the scenarios more fun to replay. IABSM’s scenarios are more detailed and the amount of troops you get is closer to what it actually was in real life – but I’m not sure that it is fun to play with three companies per side. I will probably do something in-between.

Stay tuned as I will start to post my work in progress in a couple of weeks.