All About That Base......

       Having agreed to run a Thirty Years War game at Spartacon on 11Jan20 I thought that I had best get off my backside and finish re-basing the rest of my figures. By "the rest of my figures" I mean most of the infantry which is something on the order of 400 minis! I have probably mentioned this before but I find rebasing particularly irksome; undoing work just to re-do it!

       But there was nothing left but to get started so off to the workshop I went.

 

the first step was to tear all of the figures off of their bases

this was tedious but uneventful until I got to the ones that had been painted by Trunkmonkey, 

he had gone to great lengths when he did these figures back in the early 90s 

and had cut plywood bases and superglued the figures to them 

the entire bases were glued to the larger Tercio bases

 

the loose figures were then glued to the larger Tercio bases 

with Liquid Nails "Small Projects" glue and left to dry

 

the plywood bases were simply glued over the new cardstock base

 

then I started to fix "the gloop"

a tablespoon of water (or thereabouts) followed

 by a slightly larger amount of Titebond wood glue

 

the glue dries clear so I add craft paint to the mix to give it some color, 

for the first coat they get Raw Sienna from Americana

 

nasty looking stuff

 

I paint the edges first

 

then I begin the tiresome process of painting around the feet of the figures

a #3 brush with medium stiff bristles and a good point is crucial for this step

 

then the base is thrown into the sand-pan while the glue mixture is still wet

this is allowed to set for about three minutes

 

then the base is lifted out and tapped to shed the unfixed sand back into the pan 

the glue/sand mixture sets up very hard and stiffens the base a great deal

 

close order pikemen require extra care

 

after the sand has set (normally a couple of hours are required) another batch of gloop is made using Medium Hauser Green from Americana, this is applied in a random pattern and then dusted with a mixture of Woodland Scenics fine burnt grass and short static grass

 

after an hour or so I had them all finished

a heavy spray with cheap hairspray will help fix the turf 

and a coat of matte spray finishes the job

 

now all I have to do is come up with a plausible scenario and test it a few times