I’m nearing the end of my plans for my Old West set and the specifics I’m creating for Dracula’s America. I have a few last items I want to wrap up before the end of the month to close the book on this project so that it can pull out and play at a moments notice. One of those items is finishing up the interior of my buildings.
I have four main buildings not including the church. These old TTCombat buildings are pretty bare inside and quite small. Initially, I figured I would leave them bare and untouched and just ignore any interior rules. That felt incomplete so I revised and got to work.
First up was laying down some blocking paint. For some of these buildings, I just painted the walls and called them good. To add some minimal texture/visual interest, I created some fake floors and glued them down. As you can see, there is no texture on these interiors and I wasn’t going to paint that in.
I could have ripped more stock footage of flooring of the web but I decided to make my own pattern in Illustrator. 20 minutes later, I had more floors and printed them out on standard copy paper like I do with my posters.
I used a thin layer of PVA glue and smeared it around with my finger until there is a thin layer covering every square inch. The posters never had an issue but these larger sheets tended to have some issues.
They all tended to bubble or crease with the moisture in the glue. While not ideal, it also wasn’t a bad effect so I went with it.
For most of the buildings, I just paint the walls and lay the flooring and call them done. For the Saloon however, I figure I will want that to be one of the main buildings action will go in or out of so I decide to do some extras. I go back into illustrator and create some fancy fleur-de-lis wallpaper as well as a liquor cabinet background.
I throw all my images through some Photoshop sepia post processing. This is very quick and dirty: convert the color image to grayscale, convert it back to RGB, go into photofilters and choose the sepia option. I play with the dial until I get the effect I want and then I’m done. I have an ancient copy of Photoshop so there are likely faster and easy ways to do this.
The MDF kits also come with a limited amount of furniture so I quick paint them up and when everything is placed, it works out well enough. Or rather the Saloon does. The rest of the buildings are quite sparse. Depending on how often building exploration is needed in these games, I may add more furniture in the future but for now, desperadoes looking to hide out or cause mischief indoors won’t be stuck in some unfinished shell of a building.