The last of my Syldavian and Bordurian buildings

Well, I finally finished off my buildings for my 15mm SP imagi-nations project and submitted them to the TFL Painting Challenge.

They are two small houses and a barn, all from Hovels, a company that produces lovely resin buildings at an incredibly reasonable price.

These are a better class of house than the peasant hovels that I started off my project with and are therefore more colourful and have brick chimneys.

So, that is the housing complete. I could have completed these a lot sooner, but the second half of last year provided me with many alternatives to painting.

Some Syldavian and Bordurian buildings

These rather nice models are 15mm resin one from Hovels. They are from their Eastern Europe range.

First, there is a small church;

I did a bit of googling for images of churches in the Balkans and found lots of pictures of ones with green roofs. So, green it is.

Secondly, here is what Hovels describe as a "Regional Governors house" but which I think looks more like something owned by a well-off peasant farmer or maybe a local town burgomaster. I decided that some colour was what was required here to make this building stand out;

I wrote in a previous piece about Sir William Huntley-Palmer, "Sir William also writes of the customs and superstitions of the peasants of the southern marches of the province of Moltuja. He writes at length of the legend of a fearsome demonic sorcerer from the icy north known as Crna Tomascz or Black Thomas, who the peasants believe has the power to reanimate the recently-deceased and enslave them for his evil purposes. Sir William writes that  the peasants of this region, being superstitious and in much fear of  Crna Tomascz paint their window and door frames with blue paint, which they believe will ward off the demon. He records that “the people believe that Crna Tomascz knows when someone is close to death and will climb into the house and bewitch them so that once buried he can call forth the corpse from the grave”. He also writes that across the whole region many rural buildings have their roofs partially painted red, especially along the ridges and hips to prevent a demonic entity, which he says the peasants call a  “Noc Vitek”  (trans. Night Gaunt) from roosting there."

Seeing as there isn't really a great deal of difference between the people who inhabit Syldavia and Borduria, these buildings should work happily for both sides and will look good on the table.

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.