Aspern-Essling commission. Building base 1

Hello, hello :-)

I have finished the Aspern-Essling first building base commission (got another couple to do) and I must say, it was a joy to do and I'm rather pleased with the result. You'll have to forgive me as this post will be a bit picture heavy.

It's a 28mm commission of a series of building bases for the Napoleonic campaign surrounding the Austrian/French battle of Aspern-Essling.

I was given a couple of very useful photos by the client as a starting point and I also did a fair amount of research myself. I already had plenty of German/Austrian reference photos for the earlier 10mm builds I'd done but a few more doesn't hurt :-)

The basic layout for the first two were sketched out and approved, then it was onto the building with the base size being 445mm x 305mm.

I decided to make them by hand this time. Using the laser is all well and good but sometimes the appeal of hand making something, well, appeals :-) The only lasered elements were the window frames, main building quoins/coping and the roof tiles. There is also a limited amount of textured styrene sheet in certain places (which should be apparent from the photos).

The smaller building was boxed out first and I decided to mask and spray the buildings for this as it would give a subtler finish than hand painting. The masking takes a while but on the whole I prefer this method as it's cleaner and neater. As you can see, the whole building was sprayed the panel colour, then the panels were masked out and the wood colour was sprayed afterwards. Once everything was de-masked the whole lot was given some subtle drybrushing and weathering.

The timber work was time consuming but unfortunately, buildings of this ilk tend to have plenty of beam work and so there was no chance to scrimp on it. The main building was a bit easier as it was just stone and plaster work, with exception of course to the tower on the side. The colours for the whole building were kept to the same palette so nothing jumped out or jarred.

All the buildings were done and complete before they were stuck onto the base and when this happened the ground work was applied and then the growies (quite possibly my favorite part of most commissions). The growies weren't over the top, just a good balance between practability and looks. A few other items were added to make it looked lived in, including the washing line and I think they help to finish the whole lot off.

I'll leave you with a bit of a photo dump of the final, edited pictures.

ttfn