Materials

Construction

The kit
The hut is made from hard plastic, and comes in very few bits, so it is easy to assemble. It is meant for WWII Japanese, so you get a couple of these with it, along with two pack mules. More usefully, the kit also contains bicycles, which make ideal details for a Vietnamese village, and a load of crates, pickaxes, shovels etc, which can be used on scenery or vehicles. There is also a lean-to shed, which you can see on the box lid (but not in my main photos).

Build the hut
Build the model as instructed. (Not surprisingly). The only modification that I made was to not stick the roof down, and to stiffen the roof with some scraps of plastic sprue.

Stick the hut to a base
The hut can be freestanding, but the legs are very flimsy, so I would recommend sticking it to a base. Cut a bit of heavy card, about an inch (2.5cm) larger than the outer legs. Stick the model to it with generous blobs of epoxy resin.

Texture the base
Give the card base some texture by spreading a thin layer of PVA over it (use a small scrap of card) and then sprinkling it liberally with coarse sand.

Painting the base

Basecoat the sand

Once the PVA is fully dry, basecoat the sand with dark brown.

Let this dry completely, then drybrush with a lighter brown.

Then drybrush with an even lighter brown.

(Optional) Finally lightly drybrush with a cream colour.

Once the base is painted, you can add clumps of vegetation by sticking flock to PVA. In this example, I used static grass flock.

Painting the hut

Generally when you basecoat, you start with a really dark colour, and progressively work your way to the lighter colours. However, if the thing that you are drybrushing hasn't got very deep texture, like this hut, then this will result in something which is a bit dark and greyish looking. In this case, start with a medium base colour, put on a dark wash, and then drybrush.

Start with a medium yellow ochrey brown base coat.

Wash with medium dark brown (eg Citadel Bestial Brown).

Drybrush with the basecoat

Drybrush with cream colour.