The village people

I've had this idea for some time of using some basic paper buildings to create some representational villages for my 15mm Napoleonic troops. I've seen a number of people use underscale buildings with good effect. The reason behind it is, the vertical scale of the troops is way out of proportion with the ground scale. My 16-figure battalions take up four inches across when deployed in line. If you took a 15mm house, it might take up at least that space, making a small village a good-sized city based on the amount of room it takes up.
If you slightly underscale your buildings, you can have them take up a more reasonable amount of space while still giving the impression it's a village and not just a single house.

My solution was to turn to the computer. Using the same Model Builder software featured elsewhere on this and my railroad blog, I created some basic buildings with different materials. I have some brick, some white cement (which I use to represent the whitewash or plastered look of some houses) and some stone block houses. They are simple affairs, made up of simple shapes along with a pitched roof that I printed to look like either slate or terra cotta tile. Here's what the houses look like:



This was a good start, but I needed something more to make it look like more of a built-up area. I found some old cavalry bases that measured 2"x2" that looked like they would be perfect. I printed out a sheet of cobblestone texture and cut it to fit the stands.






Put the buildings on the cobblestone sections, and you get this:



This is what it looks like when the French occupy the village:





I'll probably add some bits of greenery around the buildings to make them look a little better, but this should give you a good idea of the final product. With one building per stand, you can make the villages any size you want, and there's plenty of room to run a road through the village if you wanted to.