Blue Board Sabot bases completed

      Following on from my earlier post on scratchbuilding base from blue board
   I spent a couple of hours texturing, painting and flocking the irregularly shaped sabot bases that I had made. To my eyes they turned out well, maybe a little more color in the greenery is needed....

 

first, I rounded off the edges with a little 60 grit sandpaper

 

then I pulled apart one of my doormat hedges

 

and stabbed the base with a Phillips head screwdriver

 to make holes to glue my bits of hedge in 

 

a quick squirt of wood glue in each hole

 

next was a coat of chocolate colored house paint

dusted liberally with sand

 

once that was dried a heavy dry-brushing

 with Honey Brown from Americana

 

I painted the holes so that when figures are removed it doesn't look quite so odd

 

I bit of green to liven-up the plants

 

starting to get there

 

a heavy coat of flocking applied onto the wet  green paint

after the paint had dried this was fixed in place with cheap hairspray

 

a brief Celtic invasion occurred at this point

 

they thought that they looked rather snazzy

 

I had to threaten to tell Caesar to get them to move along

 

with the bases free again I dry-brushed them with Americana Marigold 

and touched up the taller plants with Americana Evergreen 

at this point I was happy with them 

and gave everything another heavy spray of Aquanet hairspray to lock it down

 

of course you can't have anything nice without some Imperialist showing up

 

but they did demonstrate the uses of the bases rather well

 

Jagers skirmishing in front of the Line troops

 

probably a more realistic look that straight lines 

     So, in all, about four hours of work start to finish and I have bases for about 90 figures at nearly no cost. I do believe that I will be expanding on this concept in the future.