Petite Guerre Toy Soldiers: My Flemish farmstead model - Part 2

The base structure

The bakehouse is a much smaller building than the longhouse. It consists of a single-story, gabled building, with a small shed extension to one side (perhaps a hen or goose house), and the dome-shaped bake oven to the back.

To build the main structure of the bake house, I proceeded in the same way as for the farmstead’s longhouse.

The roof

As usual, I cut the ridge of the sagging roof structure to an irregular outline.

I made the terracotta tiles with strips cut from the flute layer of a sheet of flexible, single-face corrugated cardboard (the kind consisting of one liner and one flute layer).

I cut strips about 1cm wide, a little longer than the length of the roof.

I then slightly moistened the liner and peeled it off, and glued the flute strips onto the roof structure so that they partially overlapped one another. To enhance the impression of an old, sagging roof, I intentionally laid down the flute strips somewhat irregularly…

Prior to painting the roof, I textured the tiles with small amounts of neoprene glue spread with a cocktail skewer, and sealed the whole thing with white glue.

Finally, I painted the tile roof in a mixture of red, raw umber and yellow ocher acrylics, and gave it a coat of semi-gloss protective varnish for a realistic, glazing effect.

Detailing the bakehouse walls

Note the card strips cut irregularly and glued in place to represent the framework posts and beams, and the exposed wattle-and-daub wicker netting made with white-glue-stiffened household twine.

The bake oven

The bake oven itself consists of a brick basement and a dome-shaped, plastered canopy.

For the basement, I proceeded in the same way I did for the longhouse brickwork chimney and gable-end wall.

To make the dome, I built a simple cardboard frame, covered it with small pieces of craft paper impregnated in white glue, and plastered the whole thing with papier-mâché.

To make the timber framework supporting the tile roof that covers the oven, I used strips of thick cardboard, textured as usual with neoprene glue and painted with a thin layer of diluted acrylic paint.