[How-to Tuesday] RPG “Dungeon” Style Base

For Velmarius, I’m trying to appeal to the gamer crows as well as the show piece crowd, so I need a base that both looks good and is visually interesting, and that’s practical for use in a game. Thus, I’m going to use the 1-inch square base that the model came with, and I’m going to base it in a dungeon floor type theme.

I start by quickly start by whipping up a decent size ball of green stuff. I want some rubble and dirt on part of thebase, so I can put in a shrub or something, so I only cover 3/4 of it.

I drip a couple drops of water from my painting cup onto the green stuff so nothing will stick to it.

Then, I grab a thick piece of plasti-card and use it to flatten the green stuff.  I’m left with a nice, flat surface.  I then ruin that nice flat surface by rolling around a ball of aluminum foil all over the base.  This gives it lots of cool texture.

I then dip my hobby knife into my water and carefully cut lines in the green stuff, making bricks.  I do this by just pressing the blade into the putty – I don’t draw the blade through or anything, just press it in and pop it back out.

I hit the putty with the aluminum foil ball again, just to rough up the nice straight lines I just made.

Using my clay shapers and hard tools, I roughed up the odd edge of the stone so it would look broken.

Then, I cut out one of the small back stones and moved out front, to be a broken part of one of the others, and give me a visually interesting missing stone in back.

Sand.

Black paint to start with, followed by a deep brown.  I’m using craft paints here, not P3 paints.

Then a dark grey for the stones.

Two intermediate greys via drybrushing bring out the texture.  All of my pictures of this stage are blury, so on we go.  A quick drybrush of the dirt with an orangish brown called “raw sienna”, followed by a bone color.  Then,  a wash with Secret Weapon Dark Sepia in the dirt and along the seams of the stone.  Add in a handful of Secret Weapon Autumn Leaf Scatter and a little grassy shrub thanks to Army Painter’s “Jungle Tuft”, and viola:

Lastly, the model is mounted via the two pins in the feet, and off we go!