This is a build I've wanted to do for a while. My current campaign takes place in a city that has a lot of these kinds of buildings. They're pretty much what you'd expect: a bunch of pieces of textured foam glued together in seemingly random ways. There are a few coffee stirrer pieces in there for structure but they still ended up being kind of flimsy.
Other than looking ramshackle, I wanted these to look quite old and beat up which means "warm tones weathered in grey". I imagine these kinds of shacks being made with whatever came to hand and not built from premium wood like oak. I cheated this one. I airbrushed the base coat of 2:1 brown to yellow at a coverage of something like 40%. I was surprised how well it already sold the weathered dirty look. After that we're back to drybrushing craft paints, first a dark, then a light. This punched the whole thing up a notch. I finished with a coat of my old dark wash mixed with matte medium laid on pretty heavily. I probably put the wash on too heavily or should have drybrushed with the lighter grey more heavily.
I like these kinds of builds because they can eat up the random scraps I seem to always have littering my workspace. I think the double texturing really worked for weathered and beaten planks. This was done first with the usual a fine-toothed comb then with with the wire brush. I started with PVA but got really unhappy with it and switched to hot glue. While I like the look of the not-straight planks, they were a goddamn pain to prime.
Overall I think the results are good even if they are somewhat flimsy. I'm tempted to build a few more but I'll probably wait until I've needed more than the four I've got. I might lighten them up a bit if I try it again; they're kind of dark. Total build time and painting, vastly aided by using the airbrush, was complete in about three hours.
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