Spanish Style Church from Empress Miniatures

No village is complete without a church. To complement my Caribbean pirate buildings I got the Spanish style church from Empress Miniatures.



I had been tempted to buy the Church from Empress Miniatures for quite some time. Then, while I was painting the pirate buildings from Games of War, I decided that those few houses would not be enough to form the nice little pirate settlement that I had in mind. The church would be the perfect addition to the lot.

Assembly

The church is composed of a number of parts that require assembling. Basically, there are two buildings: the church itself and the tower. Beside the resin parts that make up the majority of the buildings there are a few metal pieces for extra detailing: a bell (for the church), decorative crosses and a statue and doors.

All the parts of the Spanish Style Church kit from Empress Miniatures

In theory, assembling the kit is pretty easy and straight-forward as you only need to glue the church's front/facade to the main body and that's it. The roofs and tower sections should remain removable anyways.

Glueing the front of the church to the body of the building

However, the roof piece was a bit to long/think on one side to place and remove it smoothly from the church after the facade was attached. Therefore, I spent a good amount of time on filing off a few millimeters of the roof section.

Filing off a few millimeters of the church's roof

The separate tower is pretty useful for gameplay purposes. I could immediately see a sharpshooter climb up the tower and pick off targets across the battlefield. To allow for positioning figures inside the tower and at different heights, I added some basic floors to the tower sections by glueing some balsa/stirring sticks in place.

Adding floors to the church tower sections

Painting

The back of the tower

After painting the walls of the pirate buildings was rather Chaotic as I tried a number of paints and methods I decided that I need to be a bit more structured if I wanted to achieve a coherent look on the tower and the church itself - not only because the two pieces belong together but also because the church is a larger body that would not be finished in just one or two sessions.

After the usual black base coat and I used a mix of brown and Basalt Grey (Vallejo) as the first layer to set the tone. Subsequent layers contained more grey and/or some off-white ("bone"). I find that painting these types of walls is quite fun because you get to mix and try a lot. You don't want to come up with a uniform colour anyway so it makes sense to try a few different paints and make sure you add enough water so that the layers blend nicely.

Painting the roof was much more daunting as it took quite some time to paint each individual shingle. There might be a smarter way to get this done but I couldn't think of any other way to do it.

Painting the individual shingles with Saddle Brown (Vallejo)

Gallery

The finished church and tower:

Pirates roam the streets of the Caribbean town