Thanks for the input boys. Good to see you don't waste your 'good' paints on bases and things.
Tim. On a parallel to your tale, here's one, no two attempts at a foreign language - French.
About 12 years ago, I had the good fortune to crew a yacht from Majorca, across to S. France and up the Petite Rhone and on joining the Rhone proper travelled up through inland France, then across to the U.K.
En-route for a month, we basically lived on cooked chicken and red wine! I knew a smattering of the lingo, or so I thought. One day we moored up and I entered a village butchers. I asked for a poisson. The poor owner looked vacant, so I ran around the shop waving my arms and clucking! Two old dears at the counter were in hysterics. He waggled his finger and said a poisson was a fish and he proceeded to blow out his cheeks and make a good interpretation of a fish. Then he too ran around his shop, waving his arms and clucking saying "POULET!" I came away with a very nice, large cooked chicken!
Also during the trip. I told all the locals in the bars we visited that we were four Englishmen travelling up the Rhone in a Boite. I couldn't understand why they always laughed at me.
It wasn't until I arrived home and was telling my wife about my adventures, she said that it was no wonder they laughed, Boite is French for BOX! "You meant Bateau, dear!"
Sorry, I don't know how to type one of those upside down 'V' thingies.
...but I digress somewhat.
Dave, I think this continued isolation is starting to make cracks in my cranium, thus causing all sorts of garbage to quietly seep in!
Whilst I'm waiting for the paint etc. to dry on the base, I've made a start on the buildings.
I save all my paper design templates and was hoping to use the ones I made for that destroyed Normandy village dio I made a while back, but the basic design of the Italian houses is way different. So I've had to start from scratch.....
A couple of my tentative ideas, musing and scribbling. The Italians love random windows...and plenty of them!
By duplicating a couple of basic outlines and then just varying the window positions, I've managed to draw the outlines of all 5 buildings, front and sides, on a single A4 piece of paper.
So, with the buildings drawn, the next stage is to cut and separate them from the A4, transfer the outlines to foam board and then cut
them out!
Off to see how the base is drying out.....
Cheers,
Ron