Salem Church in 28mm

Our group briefly discussed a Salem Church scenario, and we checked our various collections for a suitable church. Since nobody had one, I decided to cobble one up...quickly...
Luckily there is a great resource for actual plans of the church via the Library of Congress:

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/va0935/

I started off with approximate dimensions and built a 'semi-scale' model.   If I had wanted a more detailed model, and wanted to spend a bit more, I would have used brick-textured plastic.  This model is in what I know as show-card, which is matte board or art board--smooth surface cardboard about 1/16 of an inch thick. Details are balsa.

Since I was not using any brick textured material, I placed some thin card "brick" randomly about the surface to be highlighed when painted.  The rest of the brick areas got two coats of stone texture paint. I believe this came from the Michael's chain of craft stores in North America. There is a variety of particles in the paint which give a pleasingly even textured surface. Colour choice is limited, and the light colour I am using is not very opaque. You could put a base colour down if you are not intending to paint the surface after the texturing. There are a couple of other shades of this available.

There used to be an alternate brand of this type of paint that had some very nice brick and stone colours.  This other type had a variety of particulate and was very nice as a final coat. It sadly is no longer available. (Too bad as I would like to add some bits to my fortress and would like to match the colour!)

The next photo shows the window frames painted and the shutters assembled. The shutters and the upper vent on the door-wall were made by gluing strips of thin balsa in a wide staircase formation.  This was then cut into strips and framed up with more balsa strips. Tedious, but fairly effective. (You can choose to work neater and more precisely than I did!)

Finally, some colour.  The roof was painted black before the tiles were added and then several coats of black to even up the surface. The brick work got a couple coats of "Terra-Cotta" and the brick detail was picked out by varying the shade of the Terra Cotta with red, browns and buff.  Then it was given a light drybrush with dark grey, buff and then just a little white to dust up the finish (tones down the red-orange of the brick) and to even it all up. Tacked on the shutters with some white glue and a few touch-ups (trying to remember all along that this was supposed to be a quick model!).

The last step will be to add some mullions to the windows.  I plan to draw them out with white pencil crayon on black or dark blue construction paper and tape them inside the window frames.