Jimbibblyblog: The Bishops Seminary

Some of you might have seen this in the recent issues of Miniature Wargames and now the articles have been published I can show the build process involved and some of the finished photos. There is also a link to Jonathans excellent blog below and some of the pictures he took and has kindly let me use.

http://jjwargames.blogspot.co.uk/

I was asked by Jonathan Jones to make a model of the Bishops Seminary in Oporto for his Peninsular campaign and was given a rough size and drawing to work from. I did have to change the initial information a little bit as I'm not very good at approximating and so got as many views of the building as possible. It was mainly a case of adding to the frequency of the windows and slightly increasing the length.

I decided to tackle this as an architectural model more than a wargaming one due to the size and regularity of the windows and main features.

All the elevations were drawn up in cad first and then assembled around a ground and roof plate.The whole lot was sprayed white and then the window frames and architectural details were sprayed grey. the whole lot was then given a light wash of ink to show the details better.

The windows themselves were scored onto a mid-grey backsprayed bit of acrylic and then they had paint rubbed in them to show the mullions and transoms.

The roof was made first as a subframe in card and then styrene pantiles sheeting was applied on top of this. After spraying red and a quick wash of brown ink, they were given a couple of drybrushes of of increasingly lighter orange.

For the garden there wasn't any information that I could find and the existing site has quite a few new buildings and a small football pitch now so I had to have a look at some generic Spanish and Portuguese formal gardens and go from there. It seemed to work and I kept it quite simple.