Advice for buildings for the Sudan

[MattofWar]

So I painted my first Armies in Plastic 54mm figure and made a test wall for terrain.  I'm going to rebase the miniature on a washer and next time I'm going to wait for the wash to by dry before varnishing so it won't get as cloudy.  I like how the texture on the wall turned out.  It's a mixture of spackle and paint brushed on and then pressed with a slightly damp sponge.




So I've been searching for info about the mud brick buildings that seem to be such a staple of colonial gaming in general and the Sudan in particular and I have a few questions.

Is there any rhyme or reason as to the depth of the space on the roof?  Some seem to have high walls, others just have high walls on the corners.  Others have no walls at all, even if they have trap doors or stairs going up to them.

What was done with windows at the time?  Wood shutters?  Screens of some sort with holes?  I've also seen pictures of some with wood sitting boxes with full shutters sticking out of the walls.  Windows also seem to vary in shapes including some very interesting key hole type shapes.  Others have no doors or windows but instead have simple curtains.

Is it just that there's no real wrong way and that I should probably have a variety?  If you were building houses for the Sudan, what would you do?  Should I be thinking of making rough top access for all the buildings just for game play reasons?  I'm going to start off skirmishing with less than 20 figures a side.

[MattofWar]

Thanks for all the help everyone   

I built my first prototype building and kept it super functional and simple.  After I have a small town's worth at this stage I'll go back and make some furniture, awnings, window and door inserts and other things like that.



The vent on the top allows for the easy removal of the roof:



The first time you do something it takes a long time, but I think I'll be able to build the rest of the town in short order.  I'm going to do multiple buildings and walls at once in an assembly line style.

[JArgo]

Although I can't give you answers to your questions I think it would be nice for you to get some feedback.

The buildings look great and the wall texture and colour seem perfect to me. A bit of decoration and detailing like you mentioned would seem sufficient.

[skip]

really like your plaster effect, you could have a few broken buildings with ruined plaster effects, these adobe buildings are built usually with mud bricks or wattle and daub, plastered with mud and whitewashed , best thing for ideas would be to search the web, many of these buildings would be different in shapes and sizes due to necessity, size of family etc. probably built by the family, friends, the windows would be small with shutters to keep the heat out possibly, any buildings I built were afghan that I saw on the web, hope this helps

brian

[chicklewis]

Nice looking ansar !!

[Mad Guru]

Sounds like you found multiple visual references online and were asking for more specifics, which I can't help provide for the Sudan, but I think you did a great job putting the references you found to very good use, especially with regard to the sponge finish texture for the walls of your buildings, which I love.  Are they made from bass or balsa wood, foamcore, or something else?

[Hupp n at em]

Really like that result, well done.     I think I may try your paint/spackle + brush + wet sponge method I like how that's turned out. 

[MattofWar]

I was asking really specific things, wasn't I?     I ended up finding some books on 19th century architecture and they had some sections on native buildings in Sudan.  I found nothing about the buildings that were present at the actual battles, but a ton of general stuff.  

It really is "anything goes" as each individual village or family would have their way of doing things.  A building with straight edged doors and windows could be right next to one with key hole shaped ones and the guy on the other side of the village might be from a family that doesn't believe in windows that people can fit or look through so they'll be slits 7 feet up the walls instead of windows.  That building is going to have a solid door too while his neighbor might just have curtains.

Oh, domes on mosques are apparently a northern nile thing and when they're present in the Sudan they're the result of an Egyptian influence.  They tend to have this four sided conical things in traditional Sudanese mosques.  With strange fang like butresses on the walls.



This one is from Ghana but it is a great example of Sudano-Sahelian architecture

Sounds like you found multiple visual references online and were asking for more specifics, which I can't help provide for the Sudan, but I think you did a great job putting the references you found to very good use, especially with regard to the sponge finish texture for the walls of your buildings, which I love.  Are they made from bass or balsa wood, foamcore, or something else?

The buildings are actually made from corrugated card board.  Two thin sheets glued together with rabbeted corners:



Newsprint is then glued over the corrugation and then over the entire surface.



News print has this texture (that really gets accentuated once it's glued and dampened) which gives the impression of bricks underneath, so that worked out pretty well.  Where ever the plaster/paint isn't quite thick enough they show through.  You can see them under the windows on the front of the building.  There's some on all sides of the buildings and between them and the plaster texture, it really hides the cardboard look.



All that said, I'm going to switch to foam core.  It'll just be way less cutting and less work to hide all the downsides of card board.

really like your plaster effect, you could have a few broken buildings with ruined plaster effects, these adobe buildings are built usually with mud bricks or wattle and daub, plastered with mud and whitewashed ,

Broken buildings are on my to do list, but first I'm going to be making a bunch more buildings and walls.  5 more small buildings like this one, 2 larger buildings and enough wall sections to connect and enclose it all as a compound/fortress or make a believable town out of it.  I also want to make some furniture, awnings and so forth.  For the exposed brick, I found this great technique from The Crafty Goblin:



I think I saw a larger novelty pencil at the local dollar store as I'll be doing 1:32 mud bricks and the normal pencil is more appropriate for smaller bricks.

Nice looking ansar !!

Thanks!

I had read here and other places that Armies in Plastic does well with a bright colours and blacklined approach, so that's what I'm going for.  I accidentally didn't let the shading dry long enough before I washed, so the ansar went a bit cloudy.  Also the amount of coats needed to get that white given that I stupidly primed him with black gesso might be contributing to his cakey texture.  That's the point of a test figure.  

Really like that result, well done.    I think I may try your paint/spackle + brush + wet sponge method I like how that's turned out.  

I tried painting on the spackle then immediately applying paint on top mixing it in with the brush right on the wall. Then I tried premixing them and then painted them.  It all pretty much turned out the same.  I can't even tell you which parts got which approaches.  The sponge hides all.

The buildings look great and the wall texture and colour seem perfect to me. A bit of decoration and detailing like you mentioned would seem sufficient.

I'm hoping the rough texture of the windows and doors allows for a friction fit insert.  So I can make different coloured shutters and curtains.  I'm probably going to go with three different door styles and three different window styles across the buildings so I can use them on more than one building.  I should also do ladders and market tables and awnings and even just bright trim around some of the windows and doors.

[sukhe_bator]

MattofWar,

You are asking all the right questions and it really is down to the environment and materials what structures were made. The Sudan shares many factors with other similar regions that dictate the architectural styles.

The main requirement is shade, but in less structured societies security is also a major issue, so doors and windows tend to be small and windows relatively high up. That being said ventilation is also important so apertures high up serve another purpose in air circulation. Compounds with windows only on the inside walls are commonplace.

If you recall accounts of FIBUA in the colonial period on pretty much every occasion the British troops resorted to cutting loopholes in the walls with their bayonets since there was inadequate provision for windows in exterior walls.

Walls are also sometimes supplemented with air vents if the space between the wall and roof joists is considered inadequate, these apertures are often decoratively finished and spaced (see above the Ghanaian mosque entrance).

The flat roof is not truly flat since it has to shed the water of occasional heavy rainfall. It is used as a space for sleeping in summer, laying out and drying food and clothing, and the parapet is both for security and to stop small kids straying.

Mud brick and adobe is the cheapest most plentiful material, but is prone to structural weakness and wet/damp, hence the epic buttresses on larger structures and the organic shapes and gently sloping walls. Timber is scarce so the rooms will be dictated by the length of the available roof joists and comparatively smaller than normal and more cell-like and clustered together. You can see this in the Ghanaian mosque which has the projecting 'scaffolding' like tie bars supporting the corbelled four-sided conical domes.

Based on photos of Central Arabian architecture, this is a freelance mosque in 15mm which I made using the same design principles...


Only more important structures like the headman's house and the mosque or bazaar will have larger enclosed spaces. There will also be longer than normal guttering/water spouts of scooped out timber trunks to shed water away from the bases of walls.
I'd advise hunting for some examples of the kind of buildings such as those around Omdurman and Khartoum and having a go based on them. Even modern images of the common dwellings will give you some good visual cues ...
http://borgenproject.org/wp-content/uploads/poverty-in-khartoum.jpg
http://thevelvetrocket.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/mahdi-house2.jpg?w=915&h=687
http://cdn.wanderlust.co.uk/contentimages/userimages/JanieB/khalifayard.JPG?maxwidth=440&maxheight=262

It can be very rewarding...