Several people keep asking me how I do the movement bases for the fantasy battalions or the rest ones for solitary miniatures, so I will show you an easy and cheap way to make your own bases, the malleable condition on the main material used makes that you can use this technique to create the terrain for your own dioramas too.
Materials needed:
Plasticine or ceramic clay
PVA glue
Citadel’s movement trays (I use these ones, but you can use any other base from wood to cork keeping in mind that the edges are protected by something solid).
Notes:
You will see that i’m using plasticine, you may think that it’s too soft and weak, but this is not true, its malleable condition will make making the desired terrain easier for us, but when we add the pva glue to it, the glue will be absorved for the plasticine and it will get harder and harder over time, staying hard as a rock in some days and not being fragile as clay.
Step 1:
According to the desired size we will cut or glue together the movement trays or we will make our tray, creating some kind of sand box. Once its ready we will fill all the box with plasticine to the same level as de box edges, mainly to avoid the plasticine suffering rubbing form the edges because we will se that altough the surfice will get solid the its a soft material.
Step 2:
In this step, with the plasticine covering our tray, we will mold it to the desired shape, allways having in mind what we want to do, this time we will make a rest base for our 40k troops, so will not be using it in our games but we will have our miniatures in it while we are not using them, keeping them together and making them look better (we can make the rest bases showing dioramas altought this depende on our likings).
In this tray we will be using miniatures with a base of 25mm, we will cut the plasticine using and old miniature or we can glue and empty base to any object we can use to exert some pressure and make the cut, this way we can be sure the cut maded in the plasticine fits exactly the miniature’s bases size and having the same size will allow us to camouflage perfectly the base in the tray.
Step 3:
Once we have finished shaping the plasticine to the desired form, we will use the pva glue on all the plasticine surface including all the edges and gaps, all the surface must be covered with the glue, once the glue dry the surface of the plasticine will be solid, and this glue layer will protect the plasticine allowing us to apply several processes in it, like painting. If you are going to use some scenery on the base you will have to place it before applying the glue layer in the previous step to make the glue on this step to fix the joints between the scenery and the plasticine.
Step 4:
Once the glue layer its dried, we will do the following if we want to add some sand, we will apply pva glue where we want to place the sand and the we will apply sand on these spots ensuring all the glue gets full covered, I suggest you to keep in mind the pattern you will use on the base and give the miniature’s bases the same pattern to make them look as a whole when we put them togheter.
Step 5:
Once the glue layer that sticks the sand and the base togheter is dry, most of the time it will only need a couple of minutes, we will apply more pva glue over the sand, algought this time thinned down with some water with a proportion of 1/4, 1 part of water, 4 parts of glue, to make this layer as thin as possible and not loose the sand details.
Step 6:
Once the glue over the sand its dry, the base is ready to undercoat and paint it, this step its up to you, you will decide how to paint the base and what elements you want to include in it. Here you have an example of how a completed base looks like.
More examples:
Here you have another example about what you can do with this technique. We have used EPS in the step 1 in the areas where we wanto to make an elevation (use ONLY pva glue on EPs, as other kinds of glues will melt it causing undesired results), then in the step 2 we will cover it with plasticine and shape it to the desired form, rocks in this case, and placing all the scenery we wanted (a plate, en eldar helmet and some pipe grille), from here we will follow all the other steps to achieve a result like this.
