Easy Tile bases

[Maestro]

++ How to make good-looking tile bases, in an easy way ++

This tutorial was done for a Warhammer 40k forum where somebody asked me how I did a tile base on a model of mine. Even though the last part is rather GW-ish, the first bit might still be interesting..

Step 1:

The materials used for this are basically a sharp knife and (for this tutorial) a 40mm round base.

Step 2:

Use the knife to carve thin cravices in the base. To do this, I made 2 cuts per joint in a 'v' shape, instead of just cutting straight down. Watch out for your fingers here and make sure you don't go through the base.

Step 3:

Dammage. Use the knife again to make some damage to the tiles. I made a single small 'impact-thingy' in the form of a star and a few cracks.

Step 4:

Some small spots of sand were glued to the base with basic PVA (white) glue. This, I usually place around the carved damage, to make some small debris of some sort.

Step 5:

Undercoat. When painting this along with the model, step 1-4 should be done before glueing the model to the base. I used black for ease, if you use a white undercoat on your models, I highliy recommend painting the bases seperately.

Step 6:

The base was given a quick, sloppy coat of Scorched Brown. I thinned it down a bit and painted 2 layers on, to get a good covering and still being able to get paint in the sand better. It doesn't matter if theres any paint in the cravices.

Step 7:

A heavy drybrush with Bestial Brown. Again, this doesn't need to be especially neat, just make sure you whipe your brush well enough not to leave too many brush-marks.

Step 8:

A medium drybrush of 1:1 Bestial Brown and Bleached Bone. This drybrush schould be a neat drybrush, as this brings out most of the detailing on the base.

Step 9:

A very light drybrush with pure Bleached Bone. This is done mostely around the edges of the base, around the edges of the tiles and around battle damage to bring these parts out more.

Step 10:

Use a mix of 1-1-3 of Scorched Brown - Black Ink - water and a small (detail or fine detail) brush to paint the cravices. This gives them more depth and keeping the paint thin means you can easily paint them as the paint follows the recess automatically.

At this point you only need to paint the edge of the base in a colour of your choice (I like tham black with this as it draws more attention to the tiles) and then you have your basic tiled base!

In the next few steps though, I'll explain how you can make it a bit more interesting by adding a cool Imperial Eagle freehand.

++ Detailing the base ++

Step 1:

To paint the Eagle, I first drew the basic shape for it in Fortress Grey. The basic shape is a triangle, ofcourse.

Step 2:

The heads are painted on. Reason I started with these? Now you know the lokation, they're easier to paint as you've got more space and you can draw the rest of the eagle around them. The heads are basically just to elongated dots, connected by a thin line at the bottem to represent a neck.

Step 3:

Here, I've painted the body and upper part of the wings. To do this, I started by painting the wing parts starting from the head (a little bit away from the head ofcourse) and drew a line to the wing tip. This way you're sure you won't paint over the heads! From there I painted a small arc under the heads, connecting the wings, and drew a line down to the tail, widening at the end.

Step 4:

The feathers are painted in. These are just lines with some space in between them and not touching any lines drawn in the previous steps.

Step 5:

Some moss/colouring was painted on using a 1:1 mix of Catachan Green and water. After painting some patches with this mix (usually in 2 thin coats) I painted some spots with pure Catachan Green around the center of the patches for some extra colour.

After this the base is fine for using under your marines, but more details can be added like bolter shells, or more debris or skulls.

I hope this tutorial has helped you or at least given you some ideas!

Cheers and thanks for reading.

John Thompson

[Nathan Caroland]

Now THAT is a good tutorial (and also reminds me that I must enact a few other goodies around here one of these days for this sort of stuff).

Good stuff! *hits reputation button*

[supervike]

That is fantastic. Relatively simple, and great results!!

[jester of death]

wow, that is awsome. it really shows how simple it is and you layed it out plainly with no hard to know techniques.

do you have any way of doing smooth tiles???

jod

[Stupidcow]

Cool stuff, might even use it on my next IP model!

[Maestro]

Thanks guys!

JoD, for smooth tiles I'd suggest using something like thin plasticcard on the base, do the scoring in it and paint it. Only thing to be careful of then, is wiping off your drybrush very well! Best thing to use on a smooth drybrush like that would, by far, be a rouge brush. That's one of those very soft brushes women (mostly) use to put rouge on their cheeks..

John

[Malebolgia]

Hmmmm, sounds like you know way too much about that rouge thing to blame it on the women John...Oh wait, this is the wrong topic to smack-talk.

In that case...great tutorial

[supervike]

Hmmmm, sounds like you know way too much about that rouge thing to blame it on the women John...Oh wait, this is the wrong topic to smack-talk.

In that case...great tutorial

Add that to his lovely blouse in the Show your face thread and it does make one say HMMMMMMM....

[Jabberwocky]

Great job on this tutorial--I will definitely be adding this to my list of techniques. Thank you very much!

[Stupidcow]

Oh Maestro you sneaky boy in a big girl's blouse! Want some hello kitty stickers?

[Malebolgia]

Nah...he already has too many of them. He even tried to give some to me. But of course me and my enormous amount of chest hairs declined!

[Maestro]

No, I don't need any more stickers.. But seeing how you are into girly-handbags... I can always use one of those to make me even more metro-sexual...

John