Winter Wonderland – Painting Winter Western Europe Buildings.

Maybe its the shorter days, or the Xmas coffees now on offer in Costa, or perhaps it’s considering that next year will be the Battle of the Bulge books.  Either way I have got a bit of a winter theme modelling kick at the moment.  Eddie recently tracked down some Winter Engineer and Armoured Rifles while in the USA and kindly bought them back. With them being painted up I decided to also start updating my winter gaming table.

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What I will be making for this article is a Western Front Farm. 

I started with a typical base coat of grey and painted the whole model in a mix of Khaki and Green Grey (3:1).  The roof was painted Field Grey and dry brushed with citadel The Fang (Blue grey).  Windows were hit with white for the frames and green for the shutters with exposed brick work field grey and doors flat brown.  The whole model was then washed in an enamel black wash thinned with white spirit.

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Next everything was lightened back up with drybrushing, generally the base colour with some white added to it.

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Above are examples of the finished buildings post dry brush.

I arranged the buildings how I wanted them and cut out a foam board base.  Sand was glued on to the top and sides and, when dried, sprayed white.  With the buildings attached I then airbrushed white into the roofs and tops of the walls.

As always I like to point out that you could stop here and have a good looking piece of scenery.  

Instead I wanted to add snow effect.  I first tried GF9 snow effect glued onto the roofs and tops of walls and exposed detail.  it works okay but even after  a second coat doesn’t give the thick new snow look I was after.  That may be personnel taste, it’s still certainly better than other snow flock I have used.

I came across Woodland Scenic Foam Putty which I discovered works wonders for snow.  Its a thick foam that is very malleable but can be hard to apply.  I had to mix it with a small amount of water to make a paste and then applied it to the whole base, roofs and walls.  As it dries you can also use thick areas to make track marks by pushing a model into it and make little foot prints.  Pretty cool!

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And here is the finished article.

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As you can see the snow provides thickness and I also I think gives more of a sense of fall and drift.  Its also dissolvable before it sets so you could make it more patchy in areas of the roof where it would be hot.

Anyway I hope you feel chilly from the sight of it.  Look out for more snow themes as I continue to build by Bulge scenery collection.  I just hope BF release a nice snow mat!