Painting Wooden Buildings for 15mm Wargaming

These are my notes for painting Wooden Buildings. See Homemade Wooden Buildings and Commercial Wooden Buildings for more photos. If you want to make your own then check out Making Wooden Buildings.

Wooden-House-41 Mixed Village 1
Wooden-House-41 Mixed Village 1
A mix of homemade and commercial Wooden Buildings – all painted by me

This is the process I used to paint them:

  1. Black undercoat
  2. For the wooden bits:
    1. Heavy dry brush Cote D’arms 534 Dark Leather (Vallejo 145 German Camouflage Mid Brown)
    2. Dry brush Cote D’arms 524 Tan Earth (Vallejo 113 Khaki Grey)
    3. Light Dry brush 50:50 mix Cote D’arms 524 Tan Earth and White.
  3. For the thatch:
    1. Heavy Dry brush Cote D’arms 502 Field Drab
    2. Light Dry brush Cote D’arms 221 Horse Tone Dun – particularly around edges, gives a hint of Brown/Gold
    3. Light Dry brush Cote D’arms 231 Mid Grey
    4. Light Dry brush Cote D’arms 233 Linen

Some people have asked “why is the thatch grey?” presumably expecting something more golden. There are two reasons for this:

  • My commercial buildings were painted by a guy called Gordon Roach and that’s the way he painted them. I figured I may as well try to match his colours and effect and so mine are grey too.
  • This is actually realistic. Nikolas Lloyd emailed to say that real straw thatch is straw coloured when it first goes on, but turns pale grey after a while. Reconstructions of iron-age buildings etc always have grey thatch, unless new or repaired. You can see the new bits because they are straw yellow, while the rest is grey. Of course, plenty of other materials are used for thatching, including brackens and reeds. A lot of thatch is very dark.

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