'Supreme Littleness' MDF buildings assembly and Commands & Colors nostalgia!

 As you may recall I wanted to see how these 3mm buildings would scale up alongside my 6mm Crimean war figures as representing larger villages and towns so ordered a few to try. I found some spare time to work on them on Sunday and enjoyed a couple of hours putting the tiny kits together and painting them. They ARE somewhat fiddly, I have to say, and require some patience but I think the results are worth the effort. Pushing tiny laser cut pieces from the 2mm MDF sheet requires a careful hand and I found my trusty tool (see pics) very useful for this, one broken section and the kit is ruined, but I managed to get everything out with no damage. 

It took me a while to figure out assembly - as no instruction sheet was provided - before I remembered that a link to a PDF for each model was contained within the confirmatory email, very handy. At first glance I could not make out what all of the arrow shaped pieces were for, until it suddenly dawned on me  that they were slices of roof sections! Rather clever as they are 'stepped' so that when put together they give a good tiled roof appearance. Care is required to line these sections up to get a neat finish, I'm aware that some of mine are less than perfect, but given the scale it's really not too bad. Overall, using PVA glue the kits go together well and once all of the roof slices are in place a robust little building results. The bases provided are a nice touch. 

I gave everything a coat of paint using basic shades. Cavalry brown seemed a good choice for the roofs which was later washed with black ink. I also found the Vallejo black ink wash the easy solution to painting in the numerous tiny windows by turning each building on it's side and dropping it in, the etched detail holding the ink in place as it quickly dries into the MDF.  The metal roof cap of the church was missing from my kit so I knocked up a replacement from green stuff for the time being, when I order more I will ask for a spare metal casting.

Scale wise I think they will work just fine with 6mm figures, the doors are about 5/6mm high and the wall sections around 4mm, I'll get a few photos of them alongside some figures in due course preferably on the terrain mat. The base texture is just tile grout painted and highlighted.

Overall I'm really glad I ordered these and I'll be ordering more from the range. I like the small footprint and the variety of building shapes and sizes. You do need to enjoy fiddly work to get the most out of these kits!

I also managed to finish the last two regiments of foot (Royalist) for Graham. As always the Peter Pig figures are a pleasure to paint. Graham informs me that there are more cavalry and artillery to go yet before the project is finished so that's good news. Meantime I'll be painting for Tony before returning to more for Old John for whom I have a drawerful of delights including a lovely horse drawn carriage with kettle drummer for later down the line so the painting service continues to tick over nicely.

On the 6mm project front I have more in the pipeline, Russian infantry, Turkish infantry, Russian heavy Dragoons and the battery of British horse artillery. I'm also planning a Commands & Colours style hex board marked up with 90mm hexes. I enjoyed a lengthy conversation with Tony ('Foy') the other week and we chatted about the game and why we enjoy playing it so much - it was Tony who introduced me to the game 10 years ago - and I just can't seem to tear myself away from it! This is a link to my very post here about C&C (May 2012!), I referred to it as a Eureka moment at the time.

Command & Colours Napoleonic - a Eureka moment!

And finally a shot from around that time - 2012 - of my first C&C table in my wargames room. The early version was a Citadel mat marked up in yellow dots to a 95mm hex grid (don't ask me why 95mm and not 100mm). Tony kindly gifted me the dice, the cards were printed half size and cut out by hand and I also printed the square trackers and playing sheets etc although I did subsequently purchase the game and expansions it was a good was to try it all out.

Have a relaxing and peaceful Easter.

Lee.