Eastern Front Terrain: Kursk Village WIP

My apologies for the delay in updating the blog. Real life has been extremely hectic this past month preparing for Christmas and I finally had a chance to pick up a copy of The Last of Us on PS3, which has been difficult to put down. I have been working on my Hungarian Army and am mostly finished with the modeling, moving on to painting in the new year. To add to the craziness, I received my first official product painting commission for Black Tree Designs! Be sure to look for pictures in 2016 on their site of my work.

I'm also working on two boards for Adepticon 2016 - a Kursk board and a Burma board. The Kursk board will be used for the big Kursk Tank Wars event on Friday night and both will be used in Bolt Action Nationals. The Russian Windmill was the first Kursk terrain piece I completed for this board which will also incorporate large wheat fields/tall grass areas, dirt roads, rolling hills, shell craters, and a large village. I looked at a lot of period pictures of Russian villages and kolkhozes to get an idea of what I wanted to do.

The village has nine intact houses and a large Orthodox church. All are assembled using poster foamboard with 3mm hardboard bases. As Kursk is located in central Russia, I wanted to do a mix of stucco-sided and timber-sided houses - white foamboard for the former, and black for the latter. I built the foundations from either one or two layers of foamboard, finishing them with popsicle stick floorboards.

To cut down on cost, I used leftover O Gauge windows and doors to make molds and cast multiple copies for every house. I decided how many and what style of each I wanted for each house, then measured and cut all the walls. The most time-consuming part was casting all the windows and doors - even though I used quick-setting resin, it took a couple of hours to make the correct amount of usable casts.

The hardest piece has been (and will continue to be) the Russian Orthodox church. This style of church, even in the hardiest areas of Russia, has a lot of complex architectual details - multiple pitched rooflines, curved sacristies, towers, cupolas, and their distinctive onion domes.