Bringing Colour to the Slums - New Fogou Buildings

You may have seen some of my previous buildings from Fogou Models, including several post-apocalyptic / sci-fi adobe houses and the fantastic Fort Hardknox. Fogou buildings are beautifully detailed and cast in a robust dense resin. I was delighted to hear that there is a new range of adobe buildings planned for a forthcoming Kickstarter.

The new buildings are designed to be genre neutral - suitable for ancient, modern or even sci-fi gaming, and I was delighted to be offered some pre-production samples to paint up. I was supplied with some larger two-storey buildings which can also be disassembled to use as two separate buildings. The interiors are also nicely detailed and the roofs removable, should you wish to use the interior for gaming. 

Johnny and Wulf tackle some ruffians in search of the next pay cheque.

The Jazz House

As you can see, I decided to inject a lot more colour into this first building than I had done previously. After watching a documentary about the colourful barrios in Bogata and seeing some fantastically painted African buildings, I wanted to ramp up the colour levels in my adobe village.

The painting process was pretty simple:

1. Undercoat with a cheap grey primer. The sand-yellow pre-coloured resin and information from Fogou indicates this might be an unnecessary step, but I wanted to use the same process as my previous buildings.
2. Base coat with a sand-yellow spray.
3. Drybush the entire building with an off-white.
4. In turn, carefully mask each colour with tape and stipple on the colours.
5. Stipple a light brown around the base of the building.
6. Wash with a diluted brown wash around the base of the building and any other desired areas (e.g. window streaks).
7. Lightly drybrush the corners with the off-white.

All in all, I think the building took about 2.5 hours from start to finish, with the masking tape being the most time-consuming task.

I originally had the colours butting up against each other, and I wasn't particularly happy with the look, so I added the ~1.5mm white stripes between each colour. Suddenly the whole paint job really popped as a result.

The Store

With the second building I wanted to end up with something in the middle ground between the Jazz House and my earlier adobes with the simple stripes. This time I went for a block colour on the diagonal (because diagonal stripes always seem to be more sci-fi!).

I overpainted the blue-grey with a mustard stripe on each storey, adding the white advertising slogans with random characters that hopefully evoke the signage in the Helsreach illustrations from Rogue Trader.

Unlike the Jazz House, I took the opportunity to add a few detail elements to the building. The wood stack, light and junction boxes are from Fogou, whilst the canopy over the door is a cut down market stall from one of Mantic's terrain crates.

Painting this building was a lot quicker and simpler than the Jazz House, although I used the same masking technique for the coloured areas.

Like the first building, the two storeys can be used as two separate buildings.

When I get the opportunity to paint up some more of these fantastic buildings, I plan to have a variety of different colour schemes. And of course if you have a village, then you probably need a cool scenic board to use them on - that's the next project!

The streets of frontier towns can be dangerous for the unwary travelling merchant.