Corking it up when I'm going down

I finally bought cork! For twice as much as I could get it online! They always say impatience is a virtue. Found out modelzone have also started selling plasticard, but at £2 an A4 sheet which is ridiculously expensive! You can get the same stuff 20p per sheet off ebay!

Anyway. I also purchased some talus and fine buff, finally giving in to my desire to make sand/egyptian/desert bases. I had a peer at all the tomb kings stuff today as well and I really love it. I see some of those models appearing in my room at some point soon.

Had great fun making a set of bases today and actually got alot more done in a much shorter time than I have done for a couple of weeks. They are currently drying on the floor after their first layer of ink wash. Here's what I've done and how I did it so far;



Cork!

 The cork I bought is quite a finely milled grain. I'm looking to pick up a variety of different grains and thicknesses to make adding character to my bases easier. It's easy to rip off the main roll and pull pieces off to work with.

Getting ideas for final compositions

I played about with the various chunks I pulled off. These are terminator bases. It's always best to have a little play before you glue anything down.

Gllluuuueeee!

I splodge glue everywhere when making these. Because I'm going to be throwing on sand and rocks soon after, there's no need to be careful about whether the glue is going to squish out the edges of the cork - I'm going to be surrounding it with glue anyway! For some pieces it's easier to put the glue on the cork pieces.

Ready to get my tallus on

And here's the point where I don't appear to have any more photos! I added the larger tallus stones first. Only a few here and there, mostly around the edges of the pieces of cork to make it look like stone that had broken away or crumbled down abit. The larger it is the more sparingly you should use it; it's difficult to use too much sand but easy to throw too many giant rocks on something! Then I glued some of the even smaller rocks around those to look like further breakage and scattering. Finally all the base left showing was covered with pva and had the fine ballast poured over.

The ballast I used was actually cheaper, smaller grained, and generally nicer than most sands I've seen.

Mmm sandy

Here's the bases all stoned up! I threw a random square base on there because I was having fun but ran out of terminator ones. I actually also built a set of the little normal space man bases but didn't photo them.

To help ensure all of the sand was firmly bonded, and to begin the basecoating, I made up an ink wash of 4:2:1 burnt umber: raw sienna: sepia inks thinned with a little bit of matt medium and a splodge of 10% flow. I dolloped it over everything.

The sand and cork are both quite absorbant, so it's important you put something on them before you begin painting properly. Most people use a wash of thinned pva glue, some use ink washes. Some don't and end up with crappy spongey bases - it is completely up to you.

I'm looking forward to painting them tomorrow and making some more! I've even got the golden grass to go in and look all dead and dry.

Cutest curious puppy ever

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.

I'm alive!

I am actually forcing myself to not be lazy this evening and do a proper update. Boy have I gotten and done sooo much new stuff since I last posted properly. I'll start with a rundown of the new goodies first with a brief description of how good I've found them.

Warning: I have yet again failed to take pictures with any form of lightsource. Taking photos during the day seems to be... difficult, for me.

First up - loads of paints! I bought all the Vallejo liquid gold paints (I think all of them). That is, from left to right, Rich Gold, Gold, Old Gold, Green Gold, Red Gold, White Gold, Copper. Oh, I lied, I didn't buy the silver one. All 35ml bottles for £3.50. The standard 17ml bottles are £2.30 and GW 12ml bottles are £2.30, so I'm very chuffed with the price.

I haven't actually been able to use them yet. They are metallic flasks in alcoholic solution. Due to it's weight most has sunk to the bottom and I haven't found anything yet I can drop in their to agitate the material. It has been suggested to remove some with a little toothpick into a palette and to make it up in there to use it. This sounds like a plan, but I want to be able to mix it up to use it in the pot as well, as I have seen other people do.

The colours are gorgeous, and the best golds I've seen. To see them actually being used, since I don't have an example, here is a link to Czechoslovakian Tom Hanks using them to paint some Sepulchural Stalkers.

Sepulchural Stalkers

I also wanted to get more variety in my browns and greens without having to mix them up all the time because I use them so much; orks, bases, clothes, dirt and so on. I picked up a box of Flames of War paints that were on sale in hobby craft - ~£8 for 6 paints. For those of you who don't know, Flames of War paints are made by Vallejo, and fall into their Model Colour range. 6 17ml Vallejo paints for £8 is quite a nice deal!

I think I picked up the soviet box set... Some nice darker greens and a couple of browns and khakis. Very nice addition to my other paints!

Finally - bought my first P3 paints! Menoth white base (they didn't have white highlight or I would've bought that too) along with meridius blue, arcane blue, and under belly blue. They were just all too pretty and well matched not to pick up.

Soo... away from paints, and onto mediums! And inks!

I have a nice selection of Daler-Rowney inks to use now, straight or to make washes. Burnt umber, sepia, raw sienna, dark green, black and white. I've made a couple of washes using them and they are perfect - just as good as games workshops' but much cheaper and you can alter them to your preferred consistency. I very much recommend learning to make your own washes. There is a little initial investment, but it far outweighs the cost of replacing devlan mud all the time!

I will do a little update on that sometime soon.

Hobby craft were having a sale on their Galeria mediums. I bought sand texture past, black lava texture gel and medium grain gel. Going to be using them in making my scenery as well as basing and painting models. Lots of ideas on how to use those.

Speaking of scenery - I have start building and basing things like crazy. As shown in a previous update I found loads of basing and scenery materials back at uni. I couldn't fit it in my bag coming back home so I went out and grabbed some different stuff today. Giant tub of snow, couple of packs of long grass/reeds, and some ballast. Looking forward to playing with fake snow.

As a note - Modelzone is cheaper for scenery stuff that hobbycraft. Up to half price for some things, actually.

I bought hundreds of microart bases. They are all fricking awesome and I thoroughly recommend them. Boyfriend bought a dragon from mantic to stick in his Chaos army. It's a surprisingly nice model and we got it 20% off.

Couple of giant foamcore boards on sale in hobby craft too!

Hmm... I'm sure I bought some models... My friend gave me a few of her grotesques to paint up and they are coming swimmingly. Found at the moment that painting a few things at once helps me keep going. Got some space ork nobz on the go too from the black reach set and a couple of terminators.

I have actually managed wet blending on my grotesques! I'm working up from warlock purple to liche purple or whatever stupid names they've been given. Purple to pink! Annoyingly the matt medium seems to make the paints a tiny bit shinier than usual, oddly enough. I don't think it shows up too well in photos, especially since I had to take this one with flash because it was dark.

Progression from basecoated to... slimey?



This awesome photo makes the painting look shit!

It doesn't look this bad in real life... macro function is a harsh mistress :(

But formy first attempt I'm pretty pleased. I'll be getting some proper photos tomorrow taken under the sun (unlikely). Only the first layer of blending too so hopefully it will look super snazzy by the time they are done!

I will write something productive tomorrow, I promise.