Waterloo buildings part 5 - La Haye Sainte

As part of eventually getting round to my ever increasing stock of Waterloo farms to make up and paint,  I have finally finished the Leven La Haye Sainte. I have added some bits to the model so not quite as sold, and done a lot more on the basing compared to other farms including adding the orchard and sandpit. So while the buildings were painted a couple of weeks ago the actual basing has taken a while. However, I am very pleased with the outcome so no worries!

The full piece is made up of:

• the Leven La Haye Sainte;
• an extra wall out the back sold separately by Leven;
• the little hut at the back against the wall from another make;
• the kitchen garden;
• the orchard;
• the sand pit.

More on the separate bits below. I have been asked for a tutorial on the back of previous farm houses but I had pretty much finished this one so will try and remember to take photos as I go along when I start to base Gemmincourt.

Doing the roof on the main house took a bit of time, firstly to get the painting tidy around the windows but then to paint on the windows (in the model they are flat). But well worth the effort because they house looks really nice when done.

Through several of the photos you can see areas where the render has come off and bricks show through. There are a number of such bits on the model but I decided to paint over white for most to reflect that re-whitewashing of the actual building would cover small areas of exposed bricks - hence for me more realistic to do so. Plus I did not want too many patches of brick on such a small model - there is such a thing a too distressed.

The Adler artillery wheel and Perfect Six barrel which is becoming like a signature for my farms!

As per the main gate in the Papelotte building this rear doorway comes flat on the model but I painted on a wooden door effect - and with acrylic it gives it a bit of 3D effect by applying more paint than really needed.

The Kitchen Gardens

The garden is done in the same sort of way as the courtyard with a finer sand, but painted in a slightly different colour. I used white glue to paint some ridges for 4 plots in the garden area and put more sand on to created raised areas for the 'plants'. Some darker brown between to further enhance the effect of raised areas and trenches. The plants are a couple of lines of K&M flock (as used in my basing for the figures - see post), but the bulk use some sponge scenic material I think I bought from Timecast but the company is realisticmodelling.com. The hedges are the same as used in the orchard and described below.

You can see the added bits to the building best in these shots, the wall out the back is a rendered wall from Leven and the little hut is from another version of La Haye Sainte from Germany (I use the barns from it on a number of buildings as they are quite long and so very useful as other makes only have smaller buildings generally - at least until Leven started making things like Papelotte).

The Orchard

I made the orchard detachable rather than part of the main base plus a hollow U shaped base so already based trees could sit inside and be removed to allow troops to occupy it. The hedges I cut off some bases of hedges I already had because I liked the effect for this building plus saved a bit of time (see my post on hedges).

The Sandpit

I made this on a piece of plasticard and built the shape out of Woodflex filler and some sand for the sandpit bit. For some reason in the photos the grass tufts seem more spread out, weird but in real life the grass effect looks much better!

With troops

I happened to be just finishing off the flags for some KGL so decided to use them to have the real units - KGL in the farm and 95th in the sandpit. Another slight delay in posting but nice to have the correct defenders for a change. A few French battalions emerging as the vanguard of the attack.

The Waterloo buildings I have done so far are:

Quatre Bras
La Belle Alliance
Papelotte
La Haie (La Haye)

Also, for an easy way to see all my Napoleonic posts check out the Napoleonic summary page.