Not a Moment to Lose… Battle of the Bulge, Ardennes, December 1944

[PaulTRose]

Top quality scratching

[HAWKERHUNTER]

Thanks for taking the time to post these Tim. Lovely work.

[Richard48]

You are the master of this work Tim.Looks amazing.
Richard

[Jim R]

Watched this since the beginning. Very interesting. The nearly end result is superb.

[TIM FORSTER]

Thanks for all the nice things you have said...

On with the quick recap on the farmhouse...

After a coat of diluted PVA glue to seal the foam board I then gave everything a spray of dark grey and added some white for highlights.

Next I painted the individual stones and bricks.

The stones were done in two stages: roughly half of them in various shades of yellows / browns / reds and the remainder in greys. These were all done using Vallejo acrylics, because you don't want to let any enamel or other oil-based paints get to the foam...

Here it is after I had finished the stone work.



And here after I had done the bricks.



At this stage is all looks a little cartoon-like, but that will soon change.

In the image above you can see that I added a broken mill-stone in the wall (a common site in Derbyshire here in the UK). You can also see how easy it as to add texture to the surface of the XPS foam - or dislodged stones and bricks - simply by pushing into it with anything that works.

All of the 'woodwork' - doors, windows, gable ends, etc - was aded using plastic sheet of various thicknesses with wood grain scribed in using a razor saw and details added from various sources.




The next stage is the most transformative part of the process - adding mortar between the stones and bricks. Here the magical ingredient is this:


It's a water-based foam-like putty that can be applied with a brush before the excess is wiped away with a cotton bud soaked in water. I didn't take any decent photos of this step in progress, but the image below shows the effect almost immediately after the putty has dried:



And here you can see the effect after I had begun to apply some washes to tone down the whiteness of the putty...