It's been far too long since my last post here on the blog, I lay the blame partly on the fact that we've been incredibly busy during the height of the "festival season", and the rest lays at my own feet - I've had some hobby time, but have used the majority of it (not all, but more on that later *) to catch up on painting and modelling, which I don't reckon has really been 'blogworthy'.
"Touching Bases"
Having said that, I thought you might be interested in one of the projects though - basing material.
Before leaving the hobby many moons ago, the common method for basing minis was to glue them to pieces of thin plywood, and then texture them with Tetrion (a kind of polyfilla/sand mix) and then paint them (usually a green base coat followed by yellow drybrush). Immediately upon my return to gaming, I did exactly the same thing before realising how much things had changed!
Over time I tried to improve my basing technique, tryng to emulate what I saw in photo's and following youtube tutorials, but was never quite satisfied with my own results. Then Luke (of Lukes APS and Geek Gaming) released his "Base Ready" product line. A basing material with the sales pitch "glue it, dip it, done it"! I bought a 180ml tub of 'Wasteland Soil' and was over the moon with the results it gives - and would highly recommend the range cos 'it does exactly what it says on the tin'!.......
The only problem was that there's nothing in the Base Ready range that would "look right" both in a dungeon crawl and on a battlefield - and I didn't want to go down the route of rebasing my minis on clear bases, so it was thinking cap time, followed by some experimentation.
I ended up buying a huge 25 kilo bag of "2mm to Dust" granite which I put through a sieve (no, not the one from the kitchen, but a cheap one from Wilko that I bought for the job) and added a small quantity of very fine sand, a small amount of mid green sawdust flock and a darker green 2mm static grass. I just varied the quantities until I was happy with the mix.
Here's some recently painted minis based with the concoction.........
I went on to add a little dark green sponge flock, plus some larger "rocks" to one batch of the mix, with the intention of applying this to sabbot bases. This should allow me to form "units" from my individual dungeon crawl minis and field them in Dragon Rampant games..... and maybe "Song of Blades and Heroes, which I've been intending to take for a spin for a while now!
* The rest of the time?
After chatting to Stevie over on The Game Cupboard blog, and discovering just how much we share in common in our wonderful hobby, we hatched a cunning plan which would see us collaborating on a fantasy campaign project.
This has involved a fair amount of emailing, plus more modelling and painting in preparation of what's to come, and I'm delighted to say that this project is now underway, and if anyone would like to see just how Beska, Trebbelos, Krago and Pendora (from the previous post here) are now getting on in Waterdeep, you can find out here - Foreigners in a strange land and my own "first post" has just been hosted too if you're interested in my foray into D&D 5e.
For anyone who hasn't already, I'd recommend visiting The Game Cupboard (either via the link above or click on the link in my 'Favourites' to the right of this post). While you're there, why not click the "Follow" button and keep up to date with our shenanigans??
Thanks muchly for visiting (and putting up with such a long break between posts), there's a game currently on the table, so a write up won't be far behind as I settle back into "business as usual" now the nights are drawing back in - blimey! it'll soon be Zomtober again!
