Holly Cottage

This piece of hand-built terrain is nearly twenty years old and illustrates how my terrain building skills have developed. The model is a 'cross-over' piece, that is to say a model that shows some of my very earliest inspiration, the cut-out-and-glue houses from Citadel (think Blood-Bath at Orcs Drift) and my sculpting of the thatch.

It is built over a simple card core, an open card core, as there is no base. A technique that I copied from the early Citadel terrain pieces. The beams were simple card overlays (added one at a time with uPVA glue), then the whole model was coated in a watered-down Polyfilla 'goo' before sculpting the thatch with DAS modelling clay.

Painting also followed the Citadel schemes of the day, Black Beams and bright heraldry! Of particular note is the texturing of the Daub panels - rather than sculpting the detail this was drawn on with a 0.3 drawing pen. A feature that has held up very well over the years.

From memory (it was a long time ago), I believe that the inspiration for this building was an Osbourne cut out card village. At one time I had a whole village of similar pieces, most were sold off some time ago, but this one; Holly House remains in the display cabinet. I don't think I can bear to part with it.

The single archer is an old Citadel casting on a 20mm x 20mm plexiglass base. I have a whole regiment of 20 figures painted in the same heraldry that have remained hidden in the attic for years. Maybe I'll get them down for a photo shoot later today - they deserve to be recorded.

Tony