I have been thinking for awhile now about how to base my miniatures because for the past five years or so I have almost exclusively based my figures by simply gluing sand and maybe putting in a rock or bush somewhere. Works fine, but now I’m painting miniatures that I don’t want to put in the sand, like dwarves, so I’ve trying out some different things.
I liked some of the bases John did, over at Just Needs Varnish!, so his ideas served as a starting point and spurred me to buy some Vallejo texture pastes. For my latest base, I wanted to use a fairly easy process to create some wet, dark earth and the pictures below are what I came up with.
The pictures show the bases a bit lighter and grainier than they actually are, but they do convey the general idea. The basing process I used is as follows:
- Glued a couple of rocks onto an old, unprimed base, then applied Vallejo Dark Earth Texture (26.218). I watered a bit of the texture down and used it as a wash on the rocks too. I used some texture wash on the plant as well.
- Washed base and plant with Agrax Earthshade and Nuln Oil in two steps. Used some watered down Agrax on the rocks, but I skipped Nuln Oil because I didn’t want to darken down the rocks too much.
- Dry brushed with Gorthor Brown.
- Applied Glossy Nuln Oil to base and plant. Thinned the wash down greatly so I would achieve some shine without excessive darkening and applied to the rocks.
- I think I could do some additional dry brushing with Gorthor Brown again, if I wanted to lighten things up more, but I’m happy with how it looks for darker earth.
For my next basing experiment I would like to try something like what I just did, but add a mud puddle or two to the mix. This will serve the dual purpose of allowing me to learn something about puddles and to see if I can replicate a base similar to the one I already made.
I recently finished poxwalker #18 in my long-term project of painting the twenty that came in the Dark Imperium set. I’m going to include this now painted worthy in my April Paint the Crap You Already Own! challenge, and I will put up some pictures of my newest addition to the Painted Horde for my next post.
Any advice about creating mud puddles? If so, I’d love to read what you have to say in the comments.