I was super excited when the Cursed City box arrived at my door. I mean, the sheer size of it was something else. Then you open it up and there are so many sprues and punch out cards and books. It really was like Christmas had come in… I don’t know… June or whenever it was?
It’s not often I get too ambitious about a miniature project. There’s a big reason why I got back in through Blood Bowl and Necromunda… I don’t have a lot of patience for painting fifty models to play a game and even less patience for big things like tanks or overly detailed beasts. I like doing normal sized miniatures that are bite-sized. The kind that, if you really put your mind to it, could get one done in a weekend.
But I’d just dropped a small bucket load of cash on Cursed City, was apparently one of five people who got my order through, and, so, I had ideas.
Well… not a lot of them. Just that I wasn’t going to base everything with texture paint, sand, or flocking. I was stepping way outside my comfort zone. I was going make my own bases from green stuff and rollers. And they would look like they were standing on actual city streets.
There were a few challenges to be sure, especially for a guy who was still fairly new getting back into the hobby. Number one was that these were push-fit miniatures with specific bases they were to slot into. And they were also some very thin push-fits, let me tell you. If you cut the tab off a zombie, there wasn’t a lot of plastic there to drill a pin into.
So this became a major crafting exercise.
As you can see above, I had to roll out a topper for each base, cut it, trim it, and ensure it lay flat on the base. Then I had to wash it since I was using sculptor’s grease (red: Vaseline) to keep it from sticking to the roller, and then figure out how to pin the mini to it.
It was… challenging. And very, very time consuming.
On the upside, it was also very successful. Most of the minis fit well with the bases and those that didn’t got little pieces of cobblestone to tie them into the theme and when you see them all on the table together, it looks very cohesive.
They’re not 100% perfect because the green stuff would sometimes stretch or imperfections might be left from the rolling or they may not fit entirely within the base and so overhang just a little. But this is why you make base toppers in bulk! So you can succeed in numbers. And, once painted, the imperfections fade into background noise anyway when compared to the whole picture.
It’s a lot of work but it’s work well worth doing if you have a similar project.
