Basing my Fire Elementals
Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 4:03 pm
For my army from the Plane of Elemental Fire, I wanted to have some cool basing that shows how hot the figures are. Here's an example:
I thought some readers might be interested in how I did this basing method.
You start with the empty base and smear it with white glue, thickly. Place the figures you want down on the base, then shake gravel over the base to cover it and let it sit.
Let it dry for a few hours and then pull the figures OFF the bases. This gives you the right size spaces to place them later. Take a big brush (very wet with water) you don't care much about and clean up the positions for the figures so the space is flat, clean of glue ridges, and clean of gravel that fell onto the glue when you removed the figures.
Let it dry completely then shake off any loose gravel.
Now paint the base with rings of color. Let each dry before going to the next one. White, then light yellow over the white, then orange, bright red, dark red, then black.
Once you have the rings, now you want to go over again (with each color in sequence) touching the rocks -- so the interior face of a rock in the orange ring would be colored yellow, and the back (hidden from the heat) face of a rock in the orange ring would be colored red. This sounds complicated, but it isn't hard. It takes a little bit of time.
Finally you drybrush the outside (cold, black) regions with white to bring out the detail in the rocky terrain. Done!
Here's an image of the base painting in process showing the rings:
- Fire Bats.jpg (1.37 MiB) Viewed 2332 times
You start with the empty base and smear it with white glue, thickly. Place the figures you want down on the base, then shake gravel over the base to cover it and let it sit.
Let it dry for a few hours and then pull the figures OFF the bases. This gives you the right size spaces to place them later. Take a big brush (very wet with water) you don't care much about and clean up the positions for the figures so the space is flat, clean of glue ridges, and clean of gravel that fell onto the glue when you removed the figures.
Let it dry completely then shake off any loose gravel.
Now paint the base with rings of color. Let each dry before going to the next one. White, then light yellow over the white, then orange, bright red, dark red, then black.
Once you have the rings, now you want to go over again (with each color in sequence) touching the rocks -- so the interior face of a rock in the orange ring would be colored yellow, and the back (hidden from the heat) face of a rock in the orange ring would be colored red. This sounds complicated, but it isn't hard. It takes a little bit of time.
Finally you drybrush the outside (cold, black) regions with white to bring out the detail in the rocky terrain. Done!
Here's an image of the base painting in process showing the rings:
- Base Painting.jpg (994.93 KiB) Viewed 2332 times
