Basing

So, I decided a while back that it would be a good idea to unify my bases, to give everything a similar feel and to be able to make and paint them in bulk.

With my husband’s experience in making mold’s he went about finding inserts for round lipped bases, which we did not have many of so found an eBay seller who sold the 3 sizes I needed and in different varieties.

After receiving the resin inserts in the mail, we glued them into the bases I had and then went about starting the process to cast them.

His process:

1. cut a large piece of foam core into squares needed

2. lay a large double-sided tape strip onto foam core squares

3. push items onto double sided tape that are intended for casting

4. cut foam core strips to hot glue down as walls creating a box for the silicone

5. mix up my silicone compound and pour into the boxes

6. wait 1 hr then remove the silicone mold from the foam core and bases from the silicone mold.

7. trim off any dags from the silicone

8. prepare my resin and go crazy making bucket loads of bases ready for painting

Now of course this process can be used on many things depending on your expertise at it and has come in handy for me with many projects and many varieties of bases and other items.

After we had poured around $20 worth of resin, making numerous bases we went about washing and sanding any little imperfections that needed to come off.

I then started the long process of blue tacking them to a large board ready for the black undercoat spray.

Once the black spray dried, I used my airbrush, following the steps bellow.

Now these next steps can also be done with a brush, using a dry brushing technique if you don’t have an airbrush or need to be precise with a small brush.

so, my highlighting steps:

1. brush the whole base with a dark brown, (the bases design is wood planks).

2. next pick a point on the base and brush that spot heavily, then while 'lightly brushing' brush lightly moving away from the chosen spot.

3. lastly using an ochre colour and repeat step 2.

Basically, this method is designed to highlight the bases directionally with the colour your using. Now to give the bases even more of an impressive look you can just use more shades of the browns and ochre lightening them up each time. My last step is to coat the whole base in agraxx earthshade or nuln oil depending on what you have, as well not forgetting to paint black on the bottom edge of the base.

For me the whole process gave me a large collection of resin bases I could use whenever needed and helped me unify all my monsters and heroes for games in the future. It is also an easy process to do again to gain more bases for all my future purchases.

I also have been working on getting a good result on printing bases, but we will see how that works out later.