18th & 19th Century Finnish Buildings – Part VII: Church of Oravainen

The church of Oravainen was build in 1795-1797. It is a wooden cross-church with an octagon center tower ending on a cupola. The main entrance has Doric (Greek) style columns. The column effect has been modelled in the upper part of the tower with wood paneling. Simpler paneling has been used for decoration on the walls and corners. There is …

18th & 19th Century Finnish Buildings – Part VI: Church of Lapua

As the selected battles of the Russo-Swedish War were reconstructed on custom boards, it was only natural to also have some local landmark standing on the board – even if it wasn’t actually involved in the battle. Churches  are often good such landmarks, them being unique and big. Therefore for the Battle of Lapua, the church of Lapua was to …

18th & 19th Century Finnish Buildings – Part V: Making yard bases

These bigger bases are used to line out a build-up area on the gaming table, so they may, depending on the scale, represent more buildings than there are models on that base. Here we have four yard-bases. Each base has a slot for a house, large utility building and a small utility building. This makes the buildings interchangeable between bases. …

18th & 19th Century Finnish Buildings – Part IV: Painting the buildings

Painting old Finnish buildings is quite straightforward; red or grey in most cases. Practically all utility building were left unpainted, the wood would turn grey in a few years and over the years it would gather some brown hues on it. This building might as well be yellow, but as it presents a real world building, which is red, then …

18th & 19th Century Finnish Buildings – Part III: Modelling buildings

The models are intended to be used with 15mm Napoleonic figures where each figure presents X men, so it makes more sense to make the buildings match the used ground scale, i.e. something between 1:150 and 1:300. The exact scale has not been calculated for any of the buildings and in some cases the length-height ratio is distorted, because each …

18th & 19th Century Finnish Buildings – Part II: Examples of utility buildings

Examples of storage and animal sheds. The sheds looked more or less the same regardless where in Finland they were located – at least from the wargamers point of view. These are two-storey sheds. Most notable is that there are no windows in these, only small air vents. The ones used for storing grain could be lifted from the ground …