Mediterranean MDF buildings revamp pt2 - A spot of roofing

As described in the first part of this series one of the main things to deal with was the roofs.  The pantiles were too dark, too plasticky and too shiny!  Luckily I had the perfect paint to hand in the form of Dulux Sumatran Melody 2, a tin of which I'd had mixed up earlier in the year when doing the bases for my Algerian War figures.  

The original colours with one repainted roof

First off I used a smallish brush to cut in round the edges of the roofs, trying not to get any paint on any other parts.  Then with a 1 cm decorating brush I covered all the tiled roofs.  One of the great things about using emulsions is they dry very quick.  All of the Dulux paints I've had made up have been made with a matt finish and they really do give a pleasing flat matt. This stage didn't take long to do at all.

A pleasing matt basecoat

The next task was to add some contrast.  I mixed up Sumatran Melody 2 with Dulux colour matched to Vallejo Iraqui Sand at approximately a 2:3 ratio and gave the whole of the roofs a thorough drybrushing.

Once this stage was dry I gave each roof a wash of Army Painter Mid Brown thinned with a few drops of AP Mixing Medium.  This tones the depth of the colour down a bit.

The wash toned down the highlights a bit too much so I went back for a fourth and final stage to do another drybrush using the same mix as stage 2.  I paid particular attention to the edges of the roofs to try and add a good highlight adding a bit more of the Iraqui Sand for more contrast.

Finished pantiles

Next up was to work on the wooden gable/rake/fascia area of each roof.  I used a mx of AP Oak Brown and AP Ash Grey mixed to around 3:1 ratio and carefully painted each part.  This toned down the MDF quite well.  

Once this was dry I realised that the bottom of the overhanging areas needed painting.  I got out the Dulux colour matched to Vallejo Leather Brown and painted all these.  It then dawned on me that this was almost the same colour as the mix I'd made up from the AP paints!

Subsquently I used the Dulux Leather Brown and AP Ash Grey at approximately a 40:60 mix to add highlights to the wood.  And that was the roofs done.  

Comments

  1. Ray Rousell11 June 2022 at 18:53

    I'm in the middle of doing the same with my buildings. I cheated, went with the AP wash first, then dry brushed a lighter tone. Then a healthy dollop of matt varnish to get rid of the shine. They realky are great looking buildings though, aren't they?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dr Beard12 June 2022 at 10:20

      Hi Ray, yes that's another way to do it. I'd like to see some pics when you're done.

      Delete
    2. Ray Rousell13 June 2022 at 18:42

      Hopefully I'll get some photos up on my blog soon.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

City ruins scatter terrain

Image
2024 and 2025 will see the 80th anniversary of many of the great city battles of the Second World War, such as Warsaw, Budapest, Königsberg and Berlin to name but a few.  With this is mind I've been looking at my terrain collection.  My city terrain is centred around some marvellous 20mm MDF buildings I got from Commission Figurines at Salute back in 2014.  I built some rubble piles a few years ago, but when I got it all out of the loft it didn't look very impressive so I decided to make some more. The first job was to sort the base materials.  I used four different materials: cork board; 5mm foam board; old plywood bases and old credit cards.  The cork board and foam board are great materials for this type of terrain proving height, being relatively strong, easy to cut and very lightweight.  I started by pulling apart pieces of cork board to the rough sizes I wanted and then set about the pieces with a Stanley knife and an old screwdriver.  It's very easy to carve irregul
Read more

28mm Victrix Late-Roman Archers and Slingers

Image
When I first embarked on my Late-Roman project a year or so ago, I bought a few sample sprues from Gripping Beast, Wargames Atlantic and Victrix.  The Victrix one was from the Late Roman Archers and Slingers set.  The quality of these convinced me to choose Victrix for the project and I duly ordered up some sets.  After working my way slowly through these I finally went back to this original frame.  These are absolutely lovely models.  There's loads of variety and they go together beautifully.  The instruction sheet which I got from the Victrix website makes a massive difference in this regard.  I really enjoyed working on these.  They were quick to assemble and quick to paint up being in a uniform of sorts.   I only have the one frame, but I took a couple of the bodies from some of the Dark Age Archers that I was working on at the same time ( here ) and added some spare arms to make another pair of staff slingers.  This worked pretty well adding variety to the poses.  I'll do
Read more

More 28mm Victrix late-Romans

Image
As I assembled the forces for my first game using the late-Roman and Germanics that I've been working on for the last few months, I realised I needed a few more figures to make up the units.  I needed an extra pedes for each infantry unit and a leader for the missile troops.  I didn't have any more specific late-Romans left so I rooted through my other Victrix sprues. The bodies for the two spearmen came from a sprue I had from the Victrix Ancient Germans set.  Belt details aside, there's very little difference between the clothing across much of the ranges.  The hands holding the spear come from the Unarmoured Late-Romans set as do the heads.  I've got so many spare heads from that one pack I could outfit whole legions!  The shields are also from that set finished with Little Big Man transfers. I'm using Warlords of Erehwon to play with and each unit is usually a minimum of four strong with a leader figure.  I had four staff slingers and four archers but no leaders
Read more