A few pieces arrived from Sarissa two days after the demo game I ran in the club of Chain of Command. Missing the terrain meant we ended up fighting in hedgerows and roads but in the grim darkness of the 41st millenium's churches. We really needed some buildings, and the only suitable relatively scaled stuff in the club was some of the Adeptus Titanicus (I think) terrain.
Another game now this evening and I have painted up the first piece that arrived, so there's something a bit more on theme. This is a nice kit. I've been sceptical of mdf kits a bit to be hoenst, the samples I've seen online have always looked very flat and manufactured so when I set out to build these, I wanted to add some texture to it and break it out a bit.
The kit itself is very compact, it comes as an a4 sheet of thin MDF, and a postcard sized sheet of thin grey card. First step, shockingly for me, was to apply some filler to the flat mdf surfaces to break up the flatness and add some texture. This was smeared on liberally to the surfaces, even to the roof, which as you can see in the finished picture above, doesn't really take away from the effect, it just looks a bit like there's some irregularities to the tiled surface, so not bad.
Once I'd textured it, it was straight to two layers of black acrylic paint. The MDF soaks up the paint something fierce, I'd tested a small amount of white paint on the sheet before I basecoated, and it dried away to essentially nothing, so the basecoat is really quite important.
After the basecoat dried, I then set to washing it with thinned down white, to give the impression of a limewash and not just be a flat block of colour. I used some gouache I had for this, and went through a number of thin layers, trying not to completely obscure the black behind, preferring instead to have the gradations of grey in the picture. At this stage I also picked out the window frames in the mdf to have the windows in a richer white.
At this point, I wanted to get the card window shutters and lintels/sills on. These were painted straight onto the grey card, just a single layer of acrylic, being sure not to use too watery a paint and not get it in the etched detail. I then punched these out and glued them on to the mdf sheet.
After this, a quick wash of the brick in red, and some yellowing washes on the whitewash to further give some variation to the surface. I felt while painting that maybe this yellowing was a bit overdone, but on the table it actually looks quite nice.
Quick coat of red paint on the grey card doors, and white on the door surrounds, then glued them on to the mdf and assembled. This is where the issue really started. The single sheet of instructions that come with the kit seem to be the same as the ones from the 28mm version Sarissa make. There are two pieces of the chimney stacks that don't exist in the 15mm version, and I tried to hedge my bets and put one layer on the outside, one layer on the inside of the stack piece. This is not correct. This is not at all correct. It's two layers inside. The outside of the stack piece connects to the gable end, and creates the supports for the roof. In my tinkering about trying to make it work I got the great idea of cutting the roof shape into the outer layer I had glued on mistakenly. This did not work. I then took it all apart, thankfully the glue was not fully set, my fault for not figuring out this subassembly before gluing. It all got sorted out in the end though, when I put it together wrong, it was very clearly wrong, and it makes a huge amount of sense when you see it assembled correctly. Overall, great kit, great price, really quick and ideal for filling a table full of good terrain quickly.