After languishing in the pile for nearly fifteen years, I have finally got around to completing the first of many Grand Manner buildings I have accumulated:
This post should probably have been titled 'How to Disappear Down a Rabbit Hole' as I hadn't intended to make a start on them yet. A few weeks ago I started work on some 15mm Najewitz Modellbau 3D printed terrain; a rather nice Spanish town with eight buildings sitting on a sculpted base which I thought we were going to need for a game.
I completed the buildings but the base is made up of twelve individual pieces and I realised that I would need to affix them to a large MDF base.
I purchase all my MDF bases from a guy in Adelaide who offers free postage on orders of $75 or more. I then remembered I have a rather nice 28mm Medieval stone church with graveyard which I had purchased from Grand Manner ten or so years ago and which would also require an MDF base.
Thinking that this and a few other odds and ends would be good to get me above the required $75 I then set about trying to locate the church so I could measure the required footprint.
The problem is that I must have purchased over seventy buildings from Grand Manner and they are all in their original dense packing spread across five very large boxes, so I spent a few hours cutting my way through bubble wrap only to find I had now unpacked ten buildings from their Napoleonic Europe range. There was no way I was going to repack them again so I thought I may as well make a start.
The first of these is called a Lindenau house, modelled after one in the Leipzig area. This is I believe actually the rear of the house:
While this is the front and side:
The houses all have lift-off roofs with, in this case, two levels of interior. Perfect for skirmish gaming, but I debated whether it was worthwhile going to the effort to paint it and if I should just glue the roof in place. In the end I decided that since it was there I may as well put in a bit of additional effort:
All up, I estimate this model took me over twenty-four hours to paint, mainly because it was my first attempt at these and there was a fair bit of trial and error.
The second house is styled after a Holzhausen cottage, from the village to the south of Leipzig: