A Cheap and Cheerful Stalingrad Building

At one of the recent gaming shows, Ninjasaurus Rex picked up a 'Stalingrad Building A' from Warbases. Now, Warbases do some really nice work in MDF, but this particular building is, ahem, basic to say the least. It consists of four sides with squares cut for the windows and doors and very little else. There is no detail at all, but it only costs £4!


Ninjasaurus bought it with the intention of trying to get to a level that would make it gameable. He added collapsed floors, wooden beams and wallpaper to the model. More than this, he also attacked it with a Dremel hand drill, to break up the shape of the windows and give it more of a battered look. He then added a base, covered with rubble and also added the entire building to a vinyl base cut to 6" square. To this base was added more rubble and made it detachable to ease storage, which is always a problem with high standing scenery pieces. He then gave the whole thing over to me to finish off. When it arrived it looked like this:

You can see on the front where he went at it with the drill. I promise you, this looks far better than when it was bought!

My first task was to make the base look something like a city street. The slightly raised vinyl tile would act as kerb and pavement around the building, so I had to texture the flat parts. I did this with some textured vinyl wallpaper I have, from B&Q, which has small impressions that look to be about the right size for 15mm cobbles or paving slabs. I cut out strips of this paper and glued it to the base, being careful to match up the cobbles, so there was less seam showing. This won't be a major problem as I can cover any cracks with rubble later.

As this dried I painted the building itself. I did the outside in a basic sand colour then painted brick red on all the windows as though the frames had been destroyed, plus a few patches here and there to make it look as though the plaster work had fallen off in firefights. It's still looking pretty basic at this stage:

Once the glue under the wallpaper was dry, I gave the entire base a spray of grey, inkwashed it in black ink and then finally drybrushed the whole thing in light grey. This was the end result of that:

You may remember the rubble mix I made for a previous building? Well, I made a lot of the mix so I could it use it in situations like this. I painted a load of PVA onto the base, sprinkled the mix over the top, let it dry and let the excess fall off. The good thing about the mix is that it doesn't need painting!

Then I turned back to the building. The walls, both outside and inside, were inkwashed in black and left to dry, then I used the weathering powders from before to add an extra dimension of dust to the entire building. This was then spray varnished to fix everything in place and it was done.

Here is the finished piece on the base, to which I had added snapped and dyed matchsticks as pieces of timber:

As you can see, the building is removable so that it can be laid down flat to lessen the amount of room needed to store it.

So, from a pretty basic kit, together, we have managed to make something that is usable on a table. It will have to be mixed in with lots of other buildings, so that the deficiencies in the details and my painting don't stand out, but I'm happy with the result and it didn't take very long to do after being prepped by Mr Rex. 

Thanks for looking!