Some buildings for my Syldavia and Borduria project

Any well-dressed wargames table needs buildings and I want to make sure that my tiny Syldavians and Bordurians have plenty of features to fight over.

I looked around for a while before settling on the 15mm resin buildings from Hovels who not only have a nice range of specifically Eastern European buildings but are also competitively-priced. Of course, I do not have to stick to buildings that are Eastern European, and Hovels also have some nice half-timbered and other buildings that should suit the 18th century period perfectly. After all, as the late Terry Pratchett used to have his Discworld characters say "The world is my mollusc".

Anyway, I bought an entire Eastern European village pack, which contains a nice variety of houses, barns and a church.

I undercoated in mid-grey everything before going on holiday and I've now completed a few houses.

First up, here are four wooden peasant houses with thatched roofs.

I thought long and hard about a colour scheme for these and decided on a simple weathered wood look and old thatch. Wood turns grey as it weathers and thatch, which starts out straw-coloured fades to a variety of grey shades as it ages. There are lots of helpful images online which show this process.

These are nice little buildings and will be useful for small settlements and villages. The buildings I bought also include a couple of larger houses for the better-off sort of peasant, as well as a barn. I might give one of these buildings a new thatch roof, for colour contrast.

My other completed building is this one;

This is a much more substantial house, suitable for all kinds of scenarios and represents the kind of place where minor landowners, officials, merchants or members of the (small in Syldavian and Bordurian terms) bourgeoisie might live. Once again, the colour palette is quite simple, with an aged thatch roof and plain whitewashed walls.

My next building will probably be the church, which is a wooden one with a tiled roof and a typically eastern dome on the roof. This will be a nice piece to paint, I think and will give me the opportunity to do something a little bit more colourful.