Buildings of the Turnipverse, a Tutorial

Hi Folks! In this tutorial I'm going to give you a look into how I make the buildings I've been doing for Turnip28. These techniques aren't particularly specialist and don't use anything esoteric. Supplies are as follows!

- Ready mixed filler/spackle

- Warcolours Brown Shade/Black Shade or similar

- Vallejo Model Colour Smoke (70.939)

- Vallejo Weathering Effects: Slimy Grime Dark

This tutorial is going to assume you know how to make basic wargames buildings - but for reference, I make mine from greyboard, which is a fairly thick cardboard used for picture mounting and model making. You can just about cut it with a pair of sturdy scissors, or a ruler and xacto if you're being precise. I use cheap superglue, though really you should use hot glue, pva, wood glue, etc etc, but if you're careful good old cyanoacrylate will do the trick!

Start off with your greyboard building with all the doors, windows, and other structural details on (though don't worry about the roof just yet). Keep off anything you'll be adding - signs, banners, mounted shields, etc - you can add those at the end. Dig into your pre-mixed filler with your gloved hand, and begin to smear it over the building. Don't worry at all about it not being neat, that's kinda the point. It'll drag and clump, which will create some really interesting texture. Your uncle who's a plasterer will cringe to see you doing it like this, but it gets the effect you need.

Try to avoid getting too much on the doors and windows themselves (though make sure you catch the inside edges of the frames). If you get some on, you can just scrape it off with a cocktail stick, coffee stirrer, and/or a sculpting tool. It'll create texture on the wood, it's fine. Doing it this way will help make those wooden details blend into the wall and make it look less like wargames terrain and more like a real building in miniature.Let that dry for a few hours - maybe overnight if you want to be sure. It's pretty quick drying stuff, but you want it to be hard.

Once the filler is dry, get a roof on it. I use tiles made from strips of cereal box card (Blue Peter eat your heart out!) but there's various ways you can do it. Corrugated card or drinking straws halved lengthways can make pantile roofs, while teddy bear fur soaked in thinned PVA and matted up will make decent thatch.

To begin painting, you want a mix of brown and black washes. Think Agrax Earthshade and Nuln Oil, but I've got these Warcolours ones which work nicely. You want a ratio of one part black to three parts brown, as the black is a stronger pigment. Thin that right down so it's very watery, and paint it directly onto the plaster. It'll shade up the rough patches really nicely, and give the whole thing a dirty, stained look. You can get it on the wood too, it works really nicely to give it an aged look.

Once that's dry, use thinned down Vallejo Smoke. This is a brown paint that's kinda like… thick contrast paint? It's a really weird one, but it's liquid gold for making things grubby. Use it neat and it's a slightly transparent brown paint, use it thinned and it's ideal for grimy, rusty streaks. It's the second one we're going to do - use it to paint thin dribbles and patches of dirt onto the walls. Think of where water and grime might stain a real building - a rotting roof timber dribbling down from the roof, a rising damp patch spreading from the floor, whatever. You can also take some on a stiff brush, wipe almost all of it off, then stipple very gently to make diffused stains of general grubbiness. I missed this stage in this photo, but I went back and added some at a later stage. 

Then you want to use this stuff - Vallejo Slimy Grime Dark, from their weathering products range. There's others on the market, notably from AK Interactive, but seriously, fuck AK and their business practices, they deserve to crumble and fold. With this, you're doing a similar thing that you did with the Smoke, but focusing more on the bottom half. This represents wet grime, green mould, that sort of thing. Don't apply too much to the bush, a little goes a long way! I spread mine up from the ground and stippled to diffuse the edges, though there's a few areas where I've dribbled it down from the edges of windows. Try not to be too regular - mould grows naturally, so try to ape that.

When that's done, use any combination of the previous steps to tweak it to your liking. I try to pick out some of the deeper cracks and crevices in the filler with the black/brown wash, and any areas where the weathering is a little strong get a very light gentle drybrush of a cold toned off white colour like Pallid Wych Flesh to ease it off a little. Then it's just a matter of painting the roof (don't forget to wash it, washes are beautiful things!) and basing it.

With basing, I use a very similar technique, smushing filler into the base to make interesting textures, then painting it a mid tan to match the Agrellan Badland that I use on my minis bases, followed by a rough and patchy wash of my favourite paint, Vallejo Smoke. I've left room on this miniature for a gallows, complete with dangling cadaver, as this building is intended as a village gaol or lockup.

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial, hope it was useful, and hope you're having a wonderful day! <3

Cat x