An epic scale barn.

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In an earlier article in issue 456 I showed how I built and painted a Wooden Church to accompany the new ‘Epic’ scale American Civil War figures from Warlord Games. It was great fun to produce and made me want to build a second similar model. A Pinterest search produced a whole load of possible subjects, but a watercolour illustration of a traditional red barn was chosen as the base for this second scratch-built model built to the ‘Epic’ scale of around 1/130th.

This has brought up some fond memories: since the launch of the new Warlord Games Epic scale American Civil War sets, I’ve been reminiscing about my earliest wargaming experiences – pushing plastic regiments of Airfix ACW figures across green-dyed bed sheets with simple chalked on features and terrain ‘scrounged’ from all sorts of different sources. My earliest pieces of scratch-built wargame terrain were a couple of terraced houses built from Newcastle Brown Ale beer mats glued together with smelly and stringy UHU glue, which – in my naivety – worked perfectly on the North American battlefields! These early gaming memories have fuelled my interest and hobby for over 50 years and with these new ACW figures from Warlord, I can now begin to build ‘correct’ period and style building for this historical conflict.

As I indicated earlier, I started with a sketch which used bits from a number of illustrations found on the internet. The sketch was amended and modified during the planning phases to fit on to a used CD base (to match in with the earlier Wooden Church model). Construction followed a similar process used on the church of a cardboard core covered with spare balsawood sheets which was detailed with strips of card and painted with acrylic paints and washes.

The mounted officer in the shot above is from the Warlord Games American Civil War Epic sprue mounted onto a round gaming counter rather than the square base supplied. This is in homage to my memories of how the ACW command figures were modelled when I used to game this period fifty years ago. I enjoyed this build so much that I might even build a third ‘Epic’ scale building to go along with these two...