Completed Central American Church

Well, it took a bit longer than I planned, but I finally completed the paper kit of Iglesia de la Asunción from Tobarra, Spain to use as the church in San Cristóbal, Golfonseca.

The main entrance.

Rear entrance

 The kit was originally designed to be built completely out of paper, but I felt that would not be sturdy enough for gaming. As such, the majority of the walls are built on to 1.5mm thick art board, and things like the roof tiles and buttresses were pasted on to cut up manila folders.  I would have liked to used thicker card for these elements, but it would have been very difficult to work with, especially for the curved roof of the bell tower. To compensate for that, I did build some card spines for under some roof elements to make them sturdier.

The curved roof of the bell tower.  A weather-vane is included for the bell tower, but I decided to leave it off as I thought it would get broken during storage and transport.

 For anyone else who wants to build this kit onto card, I would suggest you print out doubles of the wall elements. Use one set to guide cutting the card, and then the other for the final wrap of the walls.  The reason for this is you will need to trim the card to get the elements to fit behind the paper properly.For example, in the octagon section of the bell tower, I glued four walls to the paper cover and assembled the section.  I then measured the remaining spaces for last four walls and trimmed accordingly before sliding them in behind the paper and adding the roof.

On very interesting thing about this building, is that it is asymmetrical and other than the bell tower, I don't think it has any 90° angles on the corners. Looking at Google Street view of the real church, it seems to be squeezed in between several other buildings that may have forced this shape.

The lopsided design is more obvious from this angle.

The church ended up being a lot larger than I expected; the base plate is 28.5cm x 20cm, and the bell tower is about 26cm high.  It towers over my other buildings and in reality is probably a bit too grand for a village the size of San Cristóbal.  However,looking at my 15mm figures and where the door handles are, I think it is in the correct scale.

This was a fun project and I'm happy with the final results.

Radio Frente de Liberación Nacional

I always enjoy having appropriate music for my painting and gaming.  As such, I have created another Spotify radio station.  Here is Golfonseca's own Radio Frente de Liberación Nacional.  Power to the people and death to the tyrant Somoza!

15mm Central American/Caribbean Paper Church Kit

I have been looking for a 15mm church model for my Golfonseca AK47 village, but have had no luck with 15mm and HO scale producers.  Everything is either no longer in production or isn't quite the style I want. However, last night I stumbled across a free paper craft kit for a Spanish church at this website: blogtobarra.blogspot.com

The kit design is credited to Ángel Agustín and Jesús Arribas.  While a nice looking kit, there are a few issues for my need:

• The images are only 96DPI resolution. While this is fine for a monitor, you are better off printing at 300DPI or higher.
• The textures are rather flat and wouldn't blend well with my 3D painted models.
• During my discussions on LAF, I learned that stone is not commonly found in Central American churches. Instead, most everything is adobe and stucco.
• Not sure if this is going to be sturdy enough for wargaming.

Since this was looking like my best church option, I decided to use Photoshop to resize and retexture the kit. I found a nice 300DPI adobe texture photo on Google Images and used the magic wand and clone stamp tool to redo the wall textures and cover up the stones. The only part that didn't work well was on the very top of the tower, as the texture obliterated the architectural details. Instead, I used an adobe brick pattern at 50% opacity to try to disguise the stone as bricks.

Adobe wall texture and adobe brick overlay

 As such, the final result isn't completely correct for an average Central American church, but it would drive me insane trying to clean up this section pixel by pixel. 

As a final bit of detailing, I muted the colors on the roof tiles and used some wood texture on the doors to make them look a bit more realistic.

The original kit seemed slightly large for 15mm miniatures, and was also organized for printing on large sheets of paper. I decided to shrink the kit down to 80% of original and reorganized the pieces to fit onto to 11"x17" paper.

I just finished the reworking of the kit tonight, so have not had a chance to start building and check the durability. However, if you would like to try the modified kit yourself, I am linking to the JPEG pages HERE (warning: they are huge files). EDIT 01Oct13: Page 5 was missing the bell tower roof - it has now been added.

Once I have a chance to perform a test build, I'll prepare a follow up entry on the blog.

Mr. Agustín and Mr. Arribas, if you come across this modification to your kit, I hope you are OK with me distributing it.  If not, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Bienvenido to Golfonseca!

Presedente for life Somoza would like to welcome you to the  beautiful República de Golfonseca, located on the Golfo de Fonseca between Honduras and Nicaragua. My people love our Yankee brothers and we encourage you to bring your business here, where with the right government sponsorship, our peasants citizens are dying happy to provide your factories with inexpensive labor.

Here is one of our model villages, the lovely San Cristóbal:

Aerial view from one of our helpful Guardia Nacional  helicopters

Main Street

Another view of the main street

 It offers all the comforts an American investor would want:

A modern service station

Its own department store

A full service grocery store


We already have one bustling business in town, a premier cigar warehouse:

Now many people may try to tell you that Golfonseca is not safe, that those communist dogs the Frente de Liberación Nacional (FLN) will soon control this country. 

It is all lies I tell you!  My people love me, and the Guardia Nacional ensure that there is always peace with their torturous human rights respecting ways.

___________________________________________________________________________

I have been interested in the Cold War battles that raged across the Third World since I was a youth in the 1980's.  Though the AK 47 Republic rules were written for African conflicts, I grew up watching Under Fire, Romero, and Salvador, and really desired to recreate something of the horrors of that time and region in my Imagination of Golfonseca.

I actually started this project last spring. At this time I only have a few of the miniatures painted (figures are currently from Peter Pig and Battlefront) and have instead focused on the buildings.  For this layout, I predominately used buildings from Monday Knight Productions (retextured to give the stucco a smoother finish to match the other buildings), Timecast, and Gamecraft (textured with Liquitex ceramic stucco and finished with model railroad bits, primarily from Grandt Line). I also picked up a Walthers lumber company that was cut down to create the cigar warehouse. 

The trees are produced by Woodland Scenics.  Roads were made from tool chest liners purchased at the local DIY store.

For the paint schemes, I was inspired by these photos taken in the Nicaraguan town of Rivas.  The signs on the buildings are actual advertising and political posters from the region that I found using Google image search.

Once I make some more progress on my VBCW project, I'll be returning to Golfonseca.  Until then, please be patient.