The headline and the sub-head say it but there’s a truism in miniatures which is “Bases and faces make your miniatures look aces.” And it’s 100% true.
I got back into this whole thing playing Blood Bowl and, back when I played in the 90’s, the group I played with didn’t even bother with flocking. We just painted our bases green and called it a day. When I got back into it in 2019-2020, I started off doing basically the same. I even told my wife, “Bases are for people who have too much time on their hands..”
But… the more I played other people, the more I saw based miniatures, the more I watched YouTube, I realized that basing wasn’t that much of an extra effort but for what was put into it, a lot more was gained. The first thing I did was base my humans from my Blood Bowl 2018 set. Previously, they were all painted the same color green. But then I added some sawdust and flocking and then used a match stick to add a white line and… well god damn… it did look cool!
I’d like to say I did my orcs next but… I was still new to painting so I was still using size 0 brushes and it took me like four months to paint a twelve member team. So I based my humans somewhere in the middle of that. On the upside, it was the Pandemic so I had nothing else to do…
Anyway… flash forward a few years, I bought myself a green stuff roller to make cobble stones for my Cursed City minis… I mean, they’re in a city, they should be on city streets, right? Well, right as soon as I’m done with Cursed City, Ash Wastes comes out. I log into Green Stuff World and, hey, they have a kind of bio-hazard thing that, with a little bit of crustiness, could be previous tech under the sands. So that became my motif for my Orlocks and Nomads. And everything else for a little bit.
But… then I come up with this road scheme I like so much better!
Here’s the base I did for my Dune Crawler. At the time, even, I was kind of unhappy with it. It was kind of thick, my idea for using coffee grounds as texture paste didn’t pay off as well as I’d hoped… but it was done, right? So, call it a day and move on.
Well… then I’d done some cork road bases and decided that this would look so much cooler if it was a dune Crawler crossing the road. So I stripped the son of a bitch and started over:
Basically, I stripped it, added a cork layer where I wanted road, dug out some divets to make it look a bit rugged, added texture paste (actual texture paste) around the edges, primed, and then painted it up! Add a skull or two, and dry brush the “pavement” dark gray then light gray, and add some road stripes, and it’s pretty cool!
I’ve been using these same recipes for all of my Ash Wastes bases. I believe I used the same thing on my Bad Zone Enforcers, which also worked out really nicely.
