Tutorial - Basing using Bark - Snow

There are many reasons to use bits of wood and bark on your bases. It's free - I just pick my bark from branches that have come of trees, twigs that have fallen down. The pieces of bark have a lot of character to them; interesting shapes, amazing texture. You can use bark to make stone bases, wood bases, cracked earth bases. And it's very easy and quick to use.

For the most simple of bases all you need is the base itself, some pva glue, and some bits of dead tree!

Don't forget to check both sides of the bark. For this piece I actually preferred the bottom texture of the bark (on the right)

Just put a blog of glue down where you want to have your bark and drop it on. If you want the bark to be slightly raised just drop it gently on. The bark is so light that the pva glue will hold it up while it dries solid. Otherwise squish it down so it's flat against the base.

For pieces of wood taken off of twigs it's better to apply the glue down the edges rather than on the base, because of the curve.

One of the other benefits of using bark is it's very easy to trim to size and shape. But, when the base is finished it will be very strong and withstand lots of handling.

So here's my set of bases as they are at the moment! When they are dry I will go onto basecoating and what to do with the bits of the base you can still see!

When the glue was dry it's time to basecoat! I wanted to do a snow themed base so I started used Charadon Granite thinned 1:2 paint to water. Just slopped it all over and made sure it filled in all the little crevices in the bark. When that was dry I gave it a thick wash of badab black.

Basecoated left, washed right.

I left that to dry while I ran round doing something else. It's going to take a while before you can paint on it next because the wash layer should be nice and dense. Don't get impatient like I do and start trying to drybrush too early. If your wash is still even a little wet you'll just smoosh paint everywhere. Don't worry if the excess wash makes things dry shiney, either. That will be covered.  I used GW paints for this but you can use any range you like, just use greys with a tinge of blue if you want a cold type base like I do.

Shadow Grey

1:1 Shadow Grey: Space Wolves Grey



1:2 Shadow Grey: Space Wolves Grey
1:1 Space Wolves Grey: Skull White
Skull White

 Just plop your paint in the same place each time - don't mix everything up seperately. Wastes paint and time!

Good old PVA glue blobs then a sprinkle of my tiny snow flakes. If you want to build up a drift off snow all you need to do is make your layer of pva glue bigger. Once coated with the snow flakes it will look like a normal drift, rather than trying to layer the fine snow.

I started by snowing all round what was snowing of the base, then once that was all dry adding snow selectively to parts of the upper layers.

Tiny sprig of plain lichen to add a bit of character

Let your glue fully dry before you shakes off excess snow. It will look better this way and waste less.

Update! After a day my bases ended up looking fairly different. As the glue dried it turned out that the snow wasn't opaque enough to maintain the crisp white colour. It turns out more like very frosted snow, where it has been too cold or sparse to turn into a proper drift. The bases still look good - just very different from the above picture. I will upload one tomorrow of how it looks now (maybe...)

This is easily rectified by adding in some white paint or ink (I prefer ink) to your glue, or if you find some of it dries and looks like snowy than you want, simply brush some over what you've already got and add another light dusting of snow.

There is a way to make your own snow that I will be trying out this week and doing a post on. A tutorial to if it works!

You can use your imagination to refine this process to jungle bases, wood bases, wasteland bases and all sorts. If you want to see more of how I did them however, click one of the following links.