Old Roman Bridge

Hello everyone!

I finished up the Roman bridge that I needed for this week's game, and now that I have all the trees that I need I'm all set. There are a lot of old Roman bridges in Spain, and a lot of good pictures of them on the Internet for inspiration. Here's a little step-by-step tutorial of how I made my bridge; I think it turned out well. (Remember to click on the pictures for bigger versions.)

The bridge's base is a 6 inch by 3 inch chunk of corrugated cardboard. The structure of the bridge is made up of pieces of foamcore supporting a halved lengths of toilet paper tube. The road bed is a long strip of posterboard held in place with hot glue.

The sides were then glued in place. These are foamcore as well. The wood strips between the arches are for decorative purposes. The gaps between the roadbed and the sides was filled with hot glue. At this time I also built up the "banks" of the stream with blobs of hot glue.

A picture for scale. The road be is approximately 5 cm wide, which is perfect for infantry stands like these French grenadiers, but the bridge is just too narrow for 5 cm wide stands for cavalry. This isn't ideal, but it is what it is and I can't change it now.

The painting begins. I started with a coat of light gray paint on the entire bridge.I used a cheap craft acrylic called "Country Grey."

With a darker grey ("Pewter Grey") I picked out the stones. I only concentrated on the most prominent: the stones lining the arches, the stones "supporting" the arches, the stones on top of the bridge sides and the roadbed. I painted these rather wide, The roadbed pattern was made purposefully random.

The widem dark grey lines were then gone over again with a narrow pass of black to pick out the "cracks" between the stones, leaving the dark grey showing on either side of the line. This step gives the stones a three dimentional look.

I then painted the base. The water is a color called "Pool Blue" with some white highlights, while the banks are painted in two coats of brown.

The completed bridge. After painting the banks were flocked to blend in with the other terrain.

Coming soon: Really all I have left to do is brush up on the Black Powder rules and I'll be ready for the game tomorrow. I'm rather excited for my first game played with my own Napoleonics on my own terrain! It will probably be Tuesday before I can get the game report up on the blog, so stay tuned.

Questions, comments and suggestions are always welcomed and appreciated. Thanks for looking!

-Chuck