Search the Community

Hey all! Just a quick straw-poll and after your experiences... Mangler Squigs - have you stacked 'em or split 'em (by this I mean basing them up individually)? Also for those who have split them, have you had any issues playing with them at GW stores or events? So - to highlight what I mean...

Hey all! Recently bought the Wrath and Rapture boxset for my OH and myself. We've been looking at the textured moulding blocks in order to add texture to the bases. What have you found as the best thing to use, greenstuff, Milliput or other alternative's? I've used Milliput in the past for some gap filling however found that it started to crumble when it dried. If you've got examples of bases done in this method and what you used that would be excellent! Thanks in advance!

Decided to do a quick little tutorial on how I do bases for my Troggoths. Here I'm working on a 60mm base thats for my new Dankhold Troggboss. Materials used in this tutorial are. Cork trivet from Ikea Mushrooms from The Battleforge Skulls from GW Sand and rocks from my yard Flock from Gale force nine Wasteland Tufts from Armypainter Vallejo Water Texture Paint and PVA Glue So starting out I just used a pencil to mark the size of my base on the cork trivet and then placed the Troggoth inside the circle marking out where his feet went. Then it's just kinda hacking away at the cork until it looks good. Don't really know how else to explain it I then add the mushrooms and skulls to different places I used a bunch of mushrooms all around the base and added skulls to the part where the water goes they peek nicely from under the water when we are done. Masking the transition from the cork to base I use small rocks and sand everywhere you can see black parts or the base. The entire base is Primed Mechanicus Standard Gray and then painted. It's all very basic so I'm not going to start listing all the paints but one tip I want to give is that stipling some Deathworld Forest and Skarsnik Green on the rocks makes a very nice mossy look. After everything on the base is painted I paint the rim black and add my tufts and moss flock. So now we get to the exiting part. Water effects. First up you want to tape the edge where you will be applying your water. You want to make sure there are no places where the water will escape so be patient and put a good amount of tape everywhere. I use Vallejo Water Texture and it's in it self clear so I apply some Athonian Camo Shade in it and mix it in a cup before using a large syringe to apply the water effect on to the base. I usually put around 3 layers of water effect but the tape is on there only for the first one. When you apply your first layer of water effect you let it dry for around 12-15 hours and then remove the tape. You will notice the water has creeped up the tape as it dried and kinda formed a wall in it self around the base. I use this for my next two layers and just fill the base until it meets the edge that dried against the tape. On the third coat of water effect I apply some leafs before it dries so they will get stuck in the water. Now you will most likely get some water effect on the edge of your base but after everything is dry and solid I just go around the base rim with some more black paint and it looks perfect. And thats how I make my bases! Pretty simple and easy!

Yar mateys! So I think I mentioned earlier the influence for my army: So I had some things to think about. How am I going to do cloud basing? How do I make the ships look lived in? How am I going to come up with those tentacles? I've come up with some solutions (I hope!). So far, I've got the tentacles sorted at least for the smaller bases. The ships are going to require bigger and better tentacles and other cool bits and bobs. I'll cross that bridge when I get there, but I've got ideas for that too! So I made tentacles out of greenstuff...there really isn't a lot of info out there. This required some creativity and custom made tools. So what I did was cut a plastruct plastic tube down the middle (like a canoe). I then rolled up rough tube/tentacle shapes, and then put them into the tub. I pressed them in, to create the flat side while retaining the rounded side as well. For my second tool, I cut the bristles off an old paintbrush and removed as much of it from the ferrule as I could. I used this to impress the 'suckers' on the tentacles. With some cork and vallejo Dark Earth, my bases were sorted. They are now primed and ready for some paint!

I bought myself Gorechosen for Taxsmas (a traditional American gift giving holiday that occurs around February or April or whenever you get your tax returns), and decided that I would try out LAVA BASES!!! I wouldn't post this tutorial unless I thought I'd come up with something I hadn't seen elsewhere. After doing my research, I found a bunch of advice for doing lava, but nobody doing the super easy thing I had been envisioning, so I tried it, it worked, and I figured I'd share it with the world. Step 1: Put your model on the base, trace out where you want your lava floes to go. I'm leaving flat spots on the base for this guy's feet, but you can do whatever you want for that (I think it depends heavily on the model). Here are my traced out lava floes and spots for feet. Nothing too wild and crazy or inspired, just some rivers of molten rock. Step 2: Glue down sand everywhere you didn't outline. Basically, we're putting sand anywhere we don't want LAVA! (or feet, feet are good too). I just took this picture so you'd know what you're even looking at. Which in this case is a headless Slaughterpriest. Step 3: Paint the lava. I started with Wild Rider Red (which is really a nice red-orange). This is the first step where I'm doing something kind of original, it is very important that we paint a wide margin of the sand with the Wild Rider Red, because this is going to get us a cool glowing lava effect later. Step 4: Fairly straightforward progression, we're going to paint the center of the lava flow with a brighter orange. I'm still using a pot of Fiery Orange that's probably 10 years old, but I think the newer GW color that compares to it is probably Troll Slayer or Fire Dragon Orange). Step 4.5: Continue to highlight the center of the lava, I used Yriel Yellow. Step 5: Paint the sand black. I've separated this into two steps. First, paint everything that isn't orange with Abbadon Black. Step 5.5: Then, drybrush Abbadon Black over the rest of the sand. Step 6: Drybrush the black parts of the sand with Dawnstone (dark grey) to make it look kind of ashen. And you're done! Here's another finished one below. The WIP Slaughterpriest standing on it (the flash on my camera is really bringing out the Wild Rider Red on this one, it isn't nearly this harsh in real life) This is the only one I've finished so far, so this is what the finished product looks like (this pic looks more like real life, probably because it's just well lit and has no flash). Last but not least, here are some related ideas I tried out when experimenting, first one with cork basing on the White Dwarf Slaughterpriest. And then the Damsel of Distress, who I wanted to match aesthetically, but had already been fully based. I just painted the lava colors in a few spots here and there, and then drybrushed the sand black to taste.

With Drycha nearing completion she needs a base to stand on. Most of my basing is done in a fairly standard way now. The first thing to go down is the playback, which I am a huge fan of. It makes the best kinds of rocks. All I look for to start with is pieces that will keep the model level and these are glued down with Mitre Bond. Once these have been chosen I can then get cracking on extra parts. For this one I took a square forest base I had lying around and just glued that down. Then its a case of going to town with polyfilla to make it all blend together. I then stuck down the funny worm thing from the Branch Wych kit and also added in another piece of bark from the garden that I dried out. Once dry this was all covered with sand and gravel. This is the first stage pretty much done. I'll update later with the next step. After the initial layers dried I added in some of the details. I raided the Glade Rider sprue for a couple of stones and a Spite, and chucked on some skulls. I then went round and added in a lot of Black lava paste and shoved Mica Flake paste into all the crevasses and cracks. This all helps to blend the base together and get it looking as 'realistic' as possible (or at least as realistic as a fantasy base could be). Once it was all dry I undercoated it with the black and white spray painting technique. Once everything was dry I gave it a very quick undercoat. This should be done with quite wet paint so that everything can be blended onto the base and shaded. I used Rhinox Hide mostly, plus a lot of Tallarn Sand. For the rocks I used a mixture of Skavenblight Dinge and Stormvermin Furr. Once this is dry it can all get shaded with a wash or two (use all the colours to get tone, especially on the rock). Then the dry brushing can begin, along with picking out the small details and painting the little characters.

Two weeks before the Facehammer GT I decided that I could probably add Alarielle to my army list. The model is very impressive, and I basically worked on her in three separate stages - The Base, the Wardroth Beetle and Alarielle herself. Basing Alarielle For the base I followed my standard Sylvaneth basing style. I've written about it so much on this blog I imagine anyone could follow it now with ease! The first step was to glue down a nutella lid onto the so I knew where my water effects were going to go and also so I knew that they had something to be contained in. Once that was done I built up the base using the lots of playback and polyfilla. Again I left space for a channel that I made from plasticard that came out from above the rocks - this would be the starting point of my small waterfall. I also superglued on all the branches and skulls at this point and sanded it. This was all left to dry before being undercoated black and then brown over the top. Once the base was dry I could start painting it properly. Again I used a range of different browns and greys to try and vary the contrast as the base is so large. I used the traditional grey at the back and then brought more browns into it at the front. Colour was added through the very bright toadstools, and I also undercoated the pool and stream areas in a dark blue. You can see in the image above that I had done the first two resin pours as well. This took about 48 hours as the resin needs 24 hours to fully cure. Unusually I decided to go back to static grass for this base as I had a large area to cover. I then added the tufts and bushes at the end. The Waterfall is done using a combination of water effects poured out onto a non stick baking tray and left to dry. You can then peel them off and cut them to shape. I use the Woodland Scenics water effects for this and you can also use that to glue the waterfall down. The pool still needs some ripples added which I'll go back and do, but at this stage I knew I needed to get cracking on the Beetle. The Wardroth Beetle I put the Beetle together pretty quickly - Its very big, easy to assemble pieces, although if you look closely you'll see I missed off part of the wood on the top! Once built I undercoated the beetle grey and white. I used a base coat of Dark Reaper mixed with Palyd Whych Flesh to cover the model using the airbrush. I also used it to get the fade on the horns. I knew I was going to want to get green onto the model to tie in all the foliage and plants that cover the beetle sculpt so I tried to get that fade as bright as possible. I used quite a lot of dry brushing and washing on the model because of its size, and then went in and used a lot of edge highlighting to finish it off. The underside was also a very bright green so it had that kind of insectoid two tone look to it. Once this was finished it was just a fairly simple task of going round and picking out all the small details and finishing these off. Alarielle the Everqueen In contrast to the beetle Alarielle herself was an absolute pain to put together, particularly getting the wings in the correct position. I also undercoated the model White which was a really bad idea. I'd have been much better undercoating black and then using a white top coat as the model is difficult to paint in certain areas and there was a lot of white areas I struggled to get too. I started off again with the airbrush getting the wings done as I knew this would be the most annoying bit (not the most time consuming though) but it actually dry brushed up beautifully. I finished it off with glazes of yellow and way watcher green which really brightened the model up. Using lots of different green tones helps to break up such a large model nicely and I think its quite important. I then pretty much followed the Duncan video on the rest of the model. I gave her some quite scary pupil-less eyes to carry over the sylvaneth theme. The skin technique that Duncan shows in the video was very simple but remarkably effective. I just followed that step by step! I changed some of the colours from the GW video as I needed the blue of her robes to tie in with the rest of the army. I managed to finish the model off with a couple of days to spare, was really happy with it, and she was great fun to play at the tournament. I also think she helped secure a best painted nomination, although I didn't manage any awards this time. The Finished Model

I have started working on rebasing my Empire Army now as The Freeguild. There are quite a few things that appeal to me about the army from AoS as I can use the colour scheme to add in other models. I have already done some dwarfs in the red and white scheme and I like them a lot. However one thing I wasn't sure about was the basing for the models. In the end I decided to go for the Shattered Dominion base from GW. I can also get some of the hero bases now as well. The one thing that they don't do are big model bases though. To rectify this I decided to try and create my own. I used a 130mm Hardboard base that I had lying around as a starting point. On the models I have rebased so far I have used Blood for the BloodGod in all the cracks, so for the larger base I decided I wanted a blood pool on the base. I had some of the 40K pipes lying around so I glued that to the centre. I then added in some old stone walls to the side, although this isn't really visible now that the cork bark has been added. To create the bases I used Cork tiles to represent the ground levels. I'm not usually a fan, but for my purposes here its a good choice as its flat! Once these had been glued down I used cork bark to fill in all the space. To support the top layer I used some left over pink foam. I glued on a lot of the Shattered Dominion basing pieces to represent the ground, along with a manhole cover. Once everything was dry I then attacked the base with the Vallejo basing pastes to fit all the gaps and holes. I also used some sand and gravel to get some variation into the texture. I knew that the base was going to need a whole bunch of skulls on it so I glued some in place around the top. In the pool itself I cut a lot of plastic skulls into pieces so it will hopefully look like they are submerged in the blood pool. Normally I'd use water effects here, but the plan is to just use the Blood for the Blood God paint to create the pool and add a lot of gloss varnish over the top. The final construction stage will be to cut round the base and sand it so it is circular and then glue a plastic strip round the edge to cover the big gap. I'm looking forward to getting this one painted!

These are copies of a discussion I've been having in a Google+ community about using Water Effects and my experiments so far. Hopefully others can add to it here. Part 1: Does anyone know any tutorials or videos for making pools and water effects on bases??? Part 2: Ok, here is the one I've started working on as a test. I've tried the Vallejo water effects first, but it isn't sitting flat. I'm going to keep adding to it. I've ordered some clear plastic beads to go in before I do the next layer and I'll top it up again. I've added some Nurgles rot to get the green tinge. Part 3: So the water effects experimentation continues. I added the microbeads to the water effects and it works but is very subtle. It also didn't really help having the sand on the bottom of the water as the bubbles and sand grit intermingle making it hard to pick them out. For the Allarielle model I think I will make the water deeper so the bottom can't be seen which will hopefully make the bubbles work better. I also think I overdid it a bit which gave a more crystalline effect in places where the beads piled up (this might make a great Ice Base...). However by continually topping up the water effects I have managed to fill the base and it does look slimy. I also popped the model I painted in the 45 minute speed painting completion for the Painting Masters (an event we did in the UK at the start of 2015 alongside the Gaming Masters) just so the base dissent go to waste. I think I'll add some more plants as its a bit bare but I', not that concerned as its a basing exercise.

Just a quick apology for not getting a post up over the last few days, but I've been busy and not had much time to complete anything! However this morning I was able to get the Hunters on to their bases. The bases are just smaller versions of the base that you can find details of how they are done in this Drycha article. One thing that might be of interest is how the flock stays on - I very rarely have any issues with the foliage falling off the models. I use Superglue Thick from GW and am quite generous with how much I apply over the branches it will be sticking too. The foliage then has to be pressed down firmly into it and this seems to give a strong bond that lasts.

The first thing that I needed to do was figure out the right basing technique for my army, I wanted something out of my comfort zone and that would add to the overall presentation of the army. So off to YouTube I went in hopes to find some ideas. One video that caught my eye was: I wanted to do something like that but wasn't sure if I could pull it off. I watched the video a few times then went off to Home Depot to pick up some wood filler and the necessary dyes. Here are the results from two test bases I made (the hole is where I decided to be pinning the model): * Also note that in order for the cracked paint to do the work it needs it requires pretty much overnight to set. The first image was after a couple hours of drying and the rest of the shots were after I put some paint to them and added the bits of grass: I was feeling pretty pumped, I found the style I was going to use! I quickly checked it against a couple of the models that I had built to get a better idea of how it would look.

A full-time job... part time study... and on top of that I decided to register for a tournament in just over one month... What was I thinking?! Looks like I've got my work cut out for me, and so I've decided to make a blog to talk all about it and to trace my progress. The army marching to war is a member state of the Freeguild, and I need to paint roughly 2000 points for this tournament (I'm also supplying the majority of a stormcast army for a friend... so I'll be working on that too!) The current theme of my force is woodland. I really like the idea of the Freeguild marching out from the realm gates to pacify and occupy the surrounding areas. Hopefully the oncoming campaign will prove that this is not all for nought My current project tonight has been the bases for my halberdiers. I used press moulded shields cut at various angles to give the appearance of depth when stuck to the base, stones, and roots made from milliput. I have yet to add the sand, and of course the soldiers, but here they are as they currently stand:

After many hours of experimenting, failing, cursing and praying to the chaos gods I finally made 11 whole bases! I know right?! amazing so here they are! I am so please with how these came out, personally I think bases are far more important to the story of a miniature than colour scheme. I really liked the idea for my brayheard that they lived in a vast dark forest, seemingly never ending, but the happened to stumble upon a long forgotten and decaying ruined temple to the pantheon of chaos gods. In the centre of a ruins stands a realm gate which is where the true story of my army will begin. I wanted broken runes and the idols of chaos carved into the stone floor that has been broken and weathered and almost receded into the forest. I used the dark runes textured rolling pin on super sculpey to create the effect I was looking for. This project was unbelievably both fun and frustrating in equal measure, wrestling with the super sulpey and my oven so the thin sheets came out just right so they were brittle and could be snapped for the ruin effect but not burnt by the oven took a hell of a lot of failed attempts, but it is so much more satisfying when it goes right after such a struggle. Painting was simple and then adding details like the static grass and leaves really brought the bases to life and the end result was better than I expected. Thankfully I also took delivery of my beastlord model and I really love this sculpt, the name of mine is Gor'bix and he will command my army! I decided a shield looks much cooler in my humble opinion and a plus to survivability is always good for generals so after a very simple conversion here he is ready to be primed! Thanks for stopping by! Hopefully next week I will actually start painting a unit!

So I thought that I would open this blog by sharing my recently-rebased Tomb Kings. I have not purchased any models directly for Age of Sigmar yet, instead doc using on rebasing my existing collections. With the new Grand Alliance books, I'm feeling keen on the idea of adding selected units from other factions to my 8th ed armies in order to make a cosmopolitan force for the new game. The pictures (hopefully they show up correctly) represent about two thirds of my total collection for Death. I still have to rebase my Scorpion, Bone Giant, and some ninety infantry of various kinds, but this lot is more than enough to be getting on with I think!