One Day Build: Command and Colors City Hexes

5 inch hex "city" marker for 6mm Command and Colors

One Day Build:Aspern and Esslin-ish

Well, its convention season again, which means that one of my gamer friends comes to me with a " hey- can you help me make this- like before the con?!" Request.  Don't tell them this, but I actually enjoy these challenges, both as an exciting break to what I'm doing, and that I get to help them out.

On my end I challenge myself on how quick I can flip the request. This was basically a one day build, ala Adam Savage. This particular project was to create a series of hex squares that have a "city" in them to represent Asperg and Essling  for a 6mm Napoleonic Command and Colors game.

The Challenge: 
Create 9  5 inch hexes with representative buildings which can accommodate command and colors stands on the hex.


 The Build: 
 I already have a cache of "stage flat" style buildings from a project that I worked on with Jay Wiley of Wiley Games    which I used as a starting point for making the buildings. I then scaled them down to a 6mm-ish size and made templates on how they would fit and slot into the bases. This worked out to one main longer center piece and two shorter side wings.  Once I had that all figured out, I made some quick variations and then got to cutting.

Not optimally layed out, but remember- one day build!

Buildings are Birch ply, with MDF hex bases.

28mm White walker for scale!

Assembly and Painting:

I pre-painted the MDF with a couple of Rattle cans mixing a Krylon moss green and Army painted Desert sand (?)  to get a bit of variation.  This saved a lot of time especially drying time if I had painted them with brushed on paint.

The buildings are slotted so assembly was just glue in place. Before I did that though I looked on line at some cool period buildings, or models other folks had made, and then went to work getting a paint theme down.  As I would not have time to paint them all, I wanted to create an easy to follow set up that would hopefully read well on the table.   Here are the paints and inks I used.

The color swatch was for my friend to take. I ended up also giving him some ink as I had a spare bottle.

Painting these is very quick and easy. The first step was to pick an angle from which the sun was coming and stick with that. I chose kind of an 11 oclock as the angle. First I painted down the roof colors, then went in with Agrax Earthshade and added shadows across the buildings and on the roofs (once dried) . Next grey was mixed  in the with some blue grey (AV dark sea blue) to create "slate" colors, or to add a stone color to some walls or buildings. the light tan/ unbleached titanium (actually called Menon White Highlight, a P3 color) was used to add highlights to the buildings on edges, cover up some sins from over paint, and added into the roof colors to bring out a bit of dimension.

All told, a set of buildings took about 15 minutes. For fun I added some green to one of the buildings.

A more painted in scene. This was the first set.

A half done version, needing highlights.

Another angle, showing off my Elite Hussars

And yes they stack for storage! 

 This project took me about 6 hours from start to hand off. I only painted 2 of the 9 sets, so figure had I had time to do them all it would have been another couple of hours to maybe complete them. Okay,  call it 3 hours because you know I'd keep fiddling on them, and I didn't do anything to the backs!

I am keen on seeing how they turn out on the battlefield, and look forward to pics from Pacificon!

Cheers!