Siamese in Angkor, wip

Can't resist posing these together.  Will post better and more photos later as my project progresses; these are just teasers.

1/72 Italeri Church - wip

I finally decided to purchase this fine church model despite already having several churches in my collection. Once I received it in the post over the weekend, I had to start on it even though there are many other projects ahead of it in my work queue. This is the state of progress on Day 2.

The most time-consuming task has been filling and re-scribing the cornerstones after joining the walls together. I have only done this so far for the bell tower and the smaller side structure. The main walls have not yet been glued together as I plan to add some "printed" frescoes and the like to the interior walls first.  I have also added some windows and steel bars to some of the window apertures (they are hard to make out in the photos).

I am rather unhappy with how the "slate roofs" that come with the model look. The individual slates are impossibly large in size and the overall effect is less than convincing to my eyes. I plan to replace the roofing material with a sheet of HO scale Spanish tiles that I just ordered from HobbyLinc.com.

Not much by way of progress... still waiting for the roof tiles to come. Just better pictures since I took these with a proper camera rather than a phone.

Khmer Monument

As I still do not have any scenery or building that would be appropriate for Siam (Ayutthaya) at the moment, I have to fall back on an Angkor-Wat inspired piece. This is an aquarium decoration representation of the Angkor Thom Gate that I happen to have in my stash. It won't work for Siamese battles of course but will at least be appropriate for the Siamese campaigns against the Khmer.

Compare the photo above of the real thing and those below where I added some small "forest elephants" and a 1/72 figure to show the scale of the model. Based on the relative size of the human figures, I believe the aquarium decoration to be about 1/144 in scale. Even so, the model still has quite a commanding presence for 1/72 even at half its actual dimension.

So far I have only modified the piece by drybrushing it with a tan/mud color. I will put in still more weathering and highlights later on.

First weathering step done...