"Let's talk about medieval shingles" Topic

I'm working on some medieval buildings from Tabletop World. They are stone with shingle roofs, and have a bit of artistic license taken with them (so a bit fantasy rather than strictly historical).

I was planning on painting the roofs a rich shade of blue as I've seen others do:

I assumed these blue roofs were painted to represent slate shingles, but looking at the detail on the shingles of the Tabletop World model they appear to be sculpted to represent wood.

I've also noticed a prevalence of reddish roofs that look like cedar to me.

Are all of these whimsical choices or is there some basis in reality for them (even if they are taken to an extreme)?

They're is some basis in reality.

Wooden shingles used to be made of split wood, so would have a very rough texture, no doubt getting worse over age.

When new, they'd be the internal wood color, but that would quickly change to various shades of gray as they weathered in the sun.

I agree with Mako11.

What ever you decide – these are fantastic models.

Tony

Yep, they're beautiful and will look great on your table. I think blue shingles would be very attractive.

Checked in to see if the condition was worse in the Middle Ages--but these look good anyway.

Yup, fantasy. In the real world they would all weather to gray.

The blue there looks great though.

Blue shingles are a warhammer staple

The blue grey shingles really make the building as a whole 'pop'. The brown shingles makes the other building dull.

I've always drooled over this style of fantasy building but have yet to paint one. :-(

Shingles would go grey. I suppose blue-grey could be defended as "realistic"….

Are they could have stained them with berry juice.

Just a thought on blue for shingles (and other wood work) woad pigment was used as a wood preservative in areas where woad dying was carried out. The wood was soaked in the dy vat after the cloth was dyed.

Woad pigment is a good fungicide so the blue shingles may not be that fantasy.

x42

Thanks guys. X42brown, is that for real? Very interesting!

I am sitting on exactly the same problem right now – with the upper building. I stopped painting it a year ago when I realized that my shingles did not look good.

Realistically mostlook like various shades of grey after some time, and the state of these roofs (all roofs by TTW – they seem to have some pretty bad shinglers/slaters/thatchers) makes them look worn, not new.

Grey in grey, however, looks dull on these buildings, so I went to dark brown. These look strange if the wooden support structure looks lighter, though. I am not yet ready to decide how to proceed, so if you produce some results, please come back to show them.

These houses make me want to take the roofs / upper floors off and get inside of them. Anybody else interested only if we can "get inside"?…

For my purposes, blue looks the best. I decided that all buildings would have a similar shade of blue so the village will have a homogenous appearance that amplifies it's appearance. I almost went with red, but since wood and not slate or pantile, the woad preserved appearance won out. I believe the creators captured the whimsy well:

link

Great War Ace, the value of these building is that they are designed to be easy to play with. All of these buildings have accessible detailed interiors which add to the playability since you can get inside if you wish.

Luckily, you can now prevent that with a shot!

Cedar shingles don't need a preservative. The ones on my mom's cabin we put on 35 years ago and have just started to become a problem in the last 4 or 5. They are a dark brown-ish grey now and not uniformly so. And there is lots of moss.

No matter the color, those roofs are gonna leak.

The leaking roof allows water to be collected indoors, reducing the number of trips to the well. It is intelligent neglect.

The inside of these houses is as detailed as the outside – even in areas where you would normally never look.

Shingles is nasty – sorry, wrong forum

I live in Northern California and many houses were originally tiled with wooden shingles (called a shake roof here). The tiles fade to a light grey colour, often stained by moss on the north side. Preservative is not usually applied.

Tabletop colours are usually brighter and a bluish colour is a nice way to get a cooler grey so perhaps not far off reality ….

Of course if someone complains that the tiles on your buildings are the wrong colour you should take a very close look at the buttons on their figures :)

John