Spanish Village Units

 12 days of Hand-Built History and a post every day! This will slow down once I have posted images of all the projects I've got photographs of. But that will keep me going another week or ten days yet. 

Today's effort is the Spanish village units I constructed in 1999, to go with Garry Broom's vast Peninsula War collection. You cans see them posed in most of these images. Although making models flat out during the term at Hertford Uni, I was one of the few who still wanted to be building stuff during the holidays. James Sharpe was another, as I recall. 

This might be the point to explain what I mean by "village units". As I was a wargamer who plays games with large, strictly applied  ground and figure scales, I had developed the technique of starting with a base which covers the real ground area of a village for the period, to the ground scale in use. That's quite a small area when 1" = 100 paces say. Each base is then given a "perimeter" of walls, hedges or fences as appropriate and incorporating a few trees as well. Finally each one gets several buildings, perhaps including a church. Thus in a very finite area you have the impression of a real village rather than one large house its own, which sometimes stands for a village on the wargames table. The pictures you see here actually have a couple of such units pushed together for photographic purposes, but hopefully you get the idea. You should be able to pick out the same arrangements in other village units build for home use, such as the recent Ardennes stuff. 

Another feature of what I build for my own use is that the buildings are somewhat "condensed" in their ground area, whilst still hopefully looking credible with the figures used. This is so that several of them can be fitted into a village unit and give an attractive impression of a village. They are kind of not meant to be looked at as an individual house or church, but seen as part of a larger entity. Some wargamers don't like this approach, but each to their own. Of course when I built models on commission it was up to the customer. 

The other exception I make to this approach is when building something for a skirmish-level game. In this case each window or door can matter, and a structure has to look real-size in its dimensions. When I get them photographed, you will be seeing what I mean with some WWII "Chain of Command" buildings and a few Chicago gangster things I made.