Wednesday, September 9, 2009

rock 'em sock 'em robots

hello again. i was just basing one of my models and i thought "hey, i'll make a blog entry about it!".

when you put a lot of time into painting your models, you do so because you want them to look good. but how would your house look if you painted the walls really nicely but left the floors dirty, plain, or even with old paint on them? would it take away from the walls? surely. MINIATURE MODELS ARE EXACTLY THE SAME AS A HOUSE.

so here you go, this is how i make nice simple bases for my models.
(keep in mind that this is just how I do it, and there are surely several other different ways.)

1) complete the painting of your model, including ink washes. MAKE SURE EVERYTHING IS TOTALLY DRY! i learned the hard way that sand will stick to wet ink.

2) using an old brush paint the base with glue. if you want rocks or skulls or whatever do those first and let them dry in place, then put the rest of the glue on. try your best not to get any glue on anybodies feet or shoes, including your own i suppose.

3) sprinkle on your sand. i got mine from the beach. you could find yours beside the curb, buy it, grind up rocks....i dont care. dump off all the excess and let it dry completely. once again i learned this the hard way. if its not dry completely and you screw with it you will make bare patches in the sand. if you do this, you can just fix it in step 5.

4) my sand is really lightly colored so i just add an ink wash to it to color it and darken it up. gryphone sepia is nice and light and still looks like your minis are at the beach, and devlan mud is dark enough to like earth dirt. i use a mix of the two and water it down. once again...let this dry.
also....if i were going to go with painting and drybrushing to achieve specific colors i would do that in this step. (i cant argue with my minis...they like to fight on the beach.)

5) apply glue just like you did in step 2 to areas you want to have grass on. i use "static grass". sometimes i dry brush the grass to lighten or darken it up. you can use whatever you like for grass...flock, old brush bristles to create patches of long dead grass, et cetera.

6) paint black on the outer rim (for warmachine models) to clean up. done.


3 comments:

  1. too much grass on stryker....

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  2. Definitely you should avoid getting glue on your own feet...lol And miniatures are just like your house except...none of them have arc nodes.

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  3. bah, i wish our houses had arc nodes....

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