Fairly Cheap, Fairly Generic - Meditteranian / Caribbean Buildings

I've recently re-connected with an old friend who re-introduced me to the Colonial Period of the late 1800s - early 1900s, especially as interpreted by films such as The Wind and the Lion, Shout at the Devil, 55 Days at Peking and Lawrence of Arabia.  This has triggered some prodigious (for me) painting, and led me to inventing a (possibly) new terrain building technique using the canvas laminated hard boards so often used in Jr. High and High School art classes.  These boards worked pretty well for me because one side is not only textured, it's primed with Gesso.

I got lucky, and found these 50% off at the first store I visited.

My miniatures are 25mm Old Glory Berbers for Colonials and 28mm Freebooter's Fate used for fantasy Pirates.  The boards I found on sale are 4"X6" (103mm X 154mm) and 8"X10" (206mm X 255mm), scaling roughly to 20'X'30 and 40'X50', plenty big enough for my project.  The cardboard is about 3mm thick, translating to roughly 4 - 6 inches, also very good for my scale.

I tried this as an "easier to obtain in the US" variant of the cork sub flooring material used so often by Matakishi in his amazing buildings.  The hardboard is about almost as stiff as MDF and much easier to cut with a razor or X-Acto knife.

Here's the tools I used, plus a hot glue gun as my adhesive of choice.

 Here's the steps I took through the first paints applied.

Two 4x6 boards yielded me these four walls and the roof pieces below.

The last piece got chopped up to make the "peaked roof" portions of the side walls.

A bit of hot melt secured the four walls.

A piece of 100lb card stock scored and folded serving as the "chassis" of the tile roof.

I work part-time teaching industrial technology, and one of the classes I wrote recently is on making corrugated board and boxes, which taught me that the corrugated center is "glued" to the outer sides with vegetable starch.  Running the board under warm tap water dissolves the starch, making the process of peeling the outsides off the corrugated piece a relatively easy way to obtain the "terra cotta roof tiles" so often seen in Spanish influenced architecture.

A box flap cut by scissors with some lines spaced 15mm apart.

After soaking the board sides with warm tap water, I let it sit about 10 minutes and it was pretty easy to peel the outsides off the corrugated center.

After the paper is mostly dry, any bits of the outsides can be easily removed by lifting it with the point of a pencil and then pulling with fingers.

After peeling off one side, I cut the board along the drawn lines with scissors, then I peeled off the remaining "outside" and left the pieces to completely dry.

The separated and dried pieces aren't perfectly flat, but that doesn't matter.

After I hot melt glued the strips to the roof card stock, I trimmed the edges to my desired size.

Here, I've glued on the "upper walls" to fit the main walls.  Two pieces of scrap cardstock keep the roof aligned and a third, folded piece keeps the roof edges straight.

Here's the fully "tiled" roof sitting on the building walls before painting.

I "washed" the walls with very thinned down craft paint about the color of dark sand.  I covered the "tiles" with a dark red craft paint and hastily brushed on some orange craft paint "highlights".  

As I plan on building about five more of these in various configurations, I'll leave details such as covering visible bits of the blue board backing or gluing down "loose" roof tiles until all or most of the buildings have at least the base paints on them.