Old West houses

The Old West skirmish games at Historicon were inspiring, so I got off my duff and started painting up my Old Glory gunfighters and banditos. While I was at Historicon, I picked up some great resin southwestern buildings. However, to have a proper town, I decided to scratch-build some houses out of balsa. Here are the results of my first efforts. The house on the left is actually painted a weathered grey, but the digital photo rendered it light blue. I'm pretty happy with the results, though I will never use craft acrylics for anything other than a kid's poster. It took five coats to paint these guys, and some serious bracing efforts to prevent to wood from warping (you can see the roof on the left house has taken on a barn-like shape). The total cost of materials was less than $5 per house, and total time was about two and a half hours each from planning to the final touches of paint.