28mm Cotswold Stone Barn

I built his building as a sort of experiment really just to try out some new wallpapers and see how they looked on a finished building. I wanted a new barn or warehouse for my ECW collection but also I wanted to try out a Cotswold stone wallpaper that I made a few months ago as I wasn't at all sure that I liked it, at the same time I had bought a thatch wallpaper and again I wasn't sure that it would look so good on a finished building.

The structure itself was made in the usual way using a foamboard shell and this time I used a pre-formed roof made from a single piece of packaging that I got from a local supermarket. As the roof was pre-formed it dictated the size of the barn in both width and length but the height was determined by the barn doors, hence the long thin appearance of the building.

With the bare bones of the building completed I decided to wallpaper the walls and then the roof, which was not attached at this time. Once dry the roof was glued to the walls and the windows and doors were cut out and glued on and the whole building was then glued down to the base board.

The next job was to glue down the paved area and then I painted the bare areas to the colour of the dirt coloured scatter material that I would later use to cover the base. The walls looked too new and probably too light for my taste at this stage so I decided to apply a brown wash to tone it down and make it look a little more weathered.

Back to the base I fixed down all the bushes and flowers and then added a crate and a barrel as in my mind at least I pictured this building as more of a warehouse than a barn. I then turned back to the building and coated it all over with acrylic varnish to protect the paper surfaces and also help to bring out the colours a little more.

Finally the scatter material was added to the base, firstly the dirt and once dry I added the grass areas, this time though I decide to add some grass/weeds coming through the paved area to complete the look I was after and also again as an experiment to see how it looked.

Once it was finished I set it aside and had a good look at it from the distance it would be viewed at from the tabletop  and I was actually really impressed with how well the stone looked but especially impressive was the thatch effect. I have to say that wallpapers are so much easier to use than scratchbuilding in the normal way and in my opinion look just as good.