Warbases English Country Church

After a few months of figure painting, my focus has turned to buildings. Besides cleaning up some long-overdue and niggling terrain touch ups (more of that anon), I recently ordered a new church from Warbases. Ostensibly, this will be for my upcoming Home Guard v. Fallschirmjager campaign (again, more on this on a future post) for which I've already ordered and received an entire platoon and support weapons of HG from Warlord and Foundry. My plan is to add several English village-type buildings to my collection, including a parish church. This is my first building kit order from Warbases but I completely forgot to photograph the bare kit when it arrived so I lifted the pic below from the Warbases site.

This is definitely a case of getting exactly what's depicted on the tin. This is a very basic kit of a relatively simple structure. The pieces all fit quite well together (as is to be expected with laser-cut mdf and the inherently low-tolerances from the process). The only slightly niggling issue on first examination was the very shallow cutting of the stonework pattern. I was concerned that painting may obscure the pattern and not take dry-brushing well. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this wasn't an issue.

The full building, assembled and painted. I forgot to take some photos of the building process, unfortunately. I chose to stucco the walls rather than leave the bare stonework and used various inks and dry-brushing. The roof has Warbases roof tiles added. These are laser cut card and are somewhat fiddly to apply but the end result is quite nice (besides, the time spent applying them is rather therapeutic and relaxing). I've added some old Games Workshop walls for the front yard and some stone basing for the building itself.

I realized that because my figures are mounted on 3mm mdf bases, the church could do with some raising to compensate and match. I used some 3mm thick square bases as a foundation. I roughed up and sanded the edges to show wear and to highlight the gaps between each. I also added some plastic sidewalk in front of the entrance. These also were distressed by marring the edges and gaps with an exacto knife.

A close-up of the foundation stones. I ended up with a small gap at one end, since the pre-cut squares didn't quite match the dimensions of the building. Into this gap I placed a small half-cut plastic tube to simulate a drain (visible in a later pic below).

A closer shot of the front walk, showing the distressed stone squares.

A couple of pics of the stained glass windows. After sourcing the appropriate images online and resizing, I printed these on photo paper, cut them out, and mounted them  on the inside of the window openings.

The roof, showing the various inks and dry-brushing that provide variations in the colours. I was quite happy with the end result here.

The inside of the tower roof was bare mdf so I decided to line it with balsa, scored to represent wooden planking. This was then brown-inked and dry-brushed. Again, the result here is pleasing (and a perfect pot for  an FOO or sniper.

The completed model, with basing complete. I'm quite pleased with the result and this model should provide a lovely centrepiece for my quiet, sleepy English village (before the dreaded fallschirmjagers descend upon it). 

Here can be seen the small drain used to fill in the gap between the end foundations stones.