Putting brick to paper

I've never been particularly good at sticking with a painting project long enough to see it through to anything approaching a completed state, and that inability reaches out to include many other aspects of miniature hobbying.

Terrain especially has suffered from my short attention span - it would feel odd making terrain for a miniature range I hadn't painted, so I just wouldn't make any. Then, once I had painted some models up, I would feel dispirited at the lack of terrain to allow for a game (alas, book-hills and sponge-trees just didn't do it for me).

Having spent most of my hobby career dabbling in fantasy worlds, I had nothing in the way of modern scenery, and after the first, wilderness-based scenario for Pulp Alley's Perilous Island campaign the action moves to more urban settings. 

I felt the similar irritation at my lack of terrain rising, so I've tried to clamp down on my inner snob and look to less aesthetically pleasing but practical (and cheap & easy) techniques for making modern buildings. Given the choice, I'd much rather have beautifully crafted houses, complete with individual brickwork and varnished interior woodwork, but needs must. It would seem I haven't the patience to wait until I've developed the skills needed to construct (miniature) buildings, so to keep the hobby momentum going I've turned to papercraft models to flesh out the tabletop.

 

Germy has a good little collection of shoe box-like units - ideal for a beginner like myself to get an idea on how to go about putting paper buildings together - with the added benefit of having interior decor. I've found scenery to be much more fun in a tabletop game if you can interact with it in some way.

The inner snob emerged briefly to complain about all the white bits still showing, but I've shut him away again - this is about brick bums on seats.

I'm a scavenger by nature (my wife would say hoarder) and over the last year or so I have brought back some surplus flyers from work for a few events, and at last A6 bits of 350gsm card have come in handy! Some of the walls, roofs and floors aren't structurally sound as they could be, being split over two or more bits of card, but they do well enough for now.

I still found these to be a bit of a faff, cutting and measuring card not being my top choice of activity, so I wondered about resizing the box building templates so that for most of the sides I could just stick in an unmodified card.

I started with a couple of Stoelzel walls, doors and windows. I don't have any specialist programmes for this sort of thing (my computer baulks at the idea of anything much more complicated than paint, otherwise I'd be using GIMP), so over a lunch break or two I put together my templates on Powerpoint. Rather than use the A6 flyers, I started small with some defunct business cards (put aside for safe keeping, because you never know when inaccurate contact details might come in handy).

They won't win any design awards, and I think even the British property market would think twice before producing homes to these specifications, but they're a breeze to put together. A business card each for the walls, and one and a third business card each for the roof and floor. Definitely going for impression on these rather than realism!