28mm scale Romanesque Buildings

Some of these have featured in earlier posts, and although I don't have any 'step by step' constructional pictures, I thought there might be some interest in seeing the buildings and reading how they were made;

Building one was my attempt to capture the look of a building which, while crumbling, still had it's frontage more or less intact.  I needed it in a bit of a hurry, so it uses materials I had to hand - 5mm foamboard, corrugated art card, cereal packet, and drinking straws.  The base, as with previous buildings I've posted, is 3mm MDF (cut from an Ikea shelf component).  As with all my buildings for gaming, everything is laid out and spaced for the basing and figure height I mostly use - in the case of 28mm miniatures, this means 25mm round bases, approx 3mm thick, so my doorways generally need to be 30mm+ in height.

At the rear, I still wanted the building to be defensible if outflanked, so a hint of remaining wall was added along the back.  The collapsed corners allow passage of a 25mm round base.  You can see pretty clearly how basic construction went; mark out all the components on foamboard, use the interior floor as a brace (and to keep things square-ish), then cut out the decorative mouldings (the window surrounds etc.) from cereal packet card and glue them on.  Throughout, I used PVA for construction.

Before sticking the walls to the base, I marked out the floor area and tiled it with 10mm squares of cereal packet.  I like black and white chessboard floors, but grey flags, red tiles, anything really would do.  I didn't go for a plank floor, as the building was meant to be very old (and to have been part-demolished for a long time too).  A fancy mosaic would look good too - but these were originally intended for Lord of the Rings gaming, and I didn't want them to look too Roman / Byzantine.  Some tiles were left off, and the gap filled with weeds.  There are also dots of weeds in the roof tiles, and creeping up the walls here and there.  A little dirt was also added using watercolour paint 'dribbled' into various nooks and crannies - anywhere that rainwater might collect, such as roof gulleys, window surrounds, wall corners etc..