All about that base...

All about that base:

A quick update on the progress against the tracker….

It has moved very marginally post completion of the scouts shown last week. There was also an additional bump as I decided i’d run some scouts with sniper rifles (which i already have). This week has been all about constructing bases for the models to come, and so hasn’t had any impact. This worries the completionist inside me, who has been raging quietly away.

My process for the bases is pretty simple and entirely stolen (well, I bought the videos so not quite) from James Wappel’s blog Wappelious, which contains feats of painting excellence that I can only hope to one day not achieve. They consist of a layer of cork, a layer of pre baked sculpey*, which I then carve up into a rocky like texture before adding to with Vallejo gritty paste and sprinkling with small stones. It’s really simple but I think pretty effective. I also add twists of barbed wire, plastic girders, heads of slain alien scum or other such details, but this will come when the model is being fitted, as otherwise you can accidentally restrict yourself.

When painting them steer about a million miles clear of abbadon black or vallejos game colour black as they are just horrendously glossy and totally inappropriate for this purpose. Some quick drybrushes and a wash for depth and you’ve got a quick and effective scenic base! I say quick… this did take me an entire evening to do. But hey ho, with the peaceful background noise of the late Disney music (not my choice obviously) it wasn’t so bad! 

If you so choose, you can carve up the sculpey into more ‘intricate’ patterns, e.g. marble flooring and then paint it accordingly. My relatively amateurish attempt at this is shown below! Currently this base and a few other slightly poorer iterations just feature as objectives in our games!

 *A quick note on the sculpey, this is a very effective modelling/crafting tool and should definitely be employed for a variety of tasks – better people than me use it to build whole models! But make sure you follow the instructions when baking it and read all the packaging. What they do not tell you is that the sculpey is still soft after baking. DO NOT OVERBAKE IT, it does get hard when it dries. I was nervous about trying it as there are a few things about toxins if done wrong… I guess just make sure you do your research on it before diving in.. I’m not an FDA warning.