Basing the Hordes

Continued from Painting the Hordes


With a horde of little Soviet soldiers all sitting on plastic bottle caps garrisoning my table, it was time to begin the basing.

I set myself two main rules for the basing. The first is that it had to be simple to do. I have a lot of bases to do. The second is that it had to be a method I could easily use on the pre-cast bases on Battlefront's one-piece resin vehicles.

I recently used a very simple basing technique on some larger fantasy miniatures, but it involved using a sand base, which is ruled out by my second restriction of being able to use the method easily on pre-cast bases. Still, I like the method, so I decided I'd use a variation of it. Instead of a sand base I used a pumice base (Vallejo White Pumice) mixed with a darker brown color (Vallejo Model Color 826 German Camo Medium Brown).

I applied the pumice to an empty base, spreading it evenly to an approximate depth equal to that of the base of one of the miniatures. I then put a dab of white glue on the bottom of each of the miniatures and pressed them into the base. Using a sculpting tool, I then smoothed the transitions between the bases and the pumice and removed any extra pumice.

It's easier to spread the pumice onto the empty base than to try to spread it around pre-glued miniatures. I used white glue instead of superglue in the hope that it will be easier to remove figures from the base if I ever want to rebase them. The combination of the white glue and the pumice seems to hold them in solidly.

I mentioned that I mixed the pumice with a dark brown color before applying it to the base. This results in a light tan color that looks pretty good when inked over, but once again this breaks my second rule since I can't easily achieve the same light tan on a pre-cast base, so when it dries I paint over it with the same dark brown color.

After finishing the tank rider company using the above method, I don't think that I will continue to mix the pumice with paint in the future. Instead I'll simply paint over it. This should speed things up a bit and I don't think it will effect the final results.

At this point I originally tried inking the base, but found that any extra detail it brought out in the base was countered by the fact that it emphasized the differences where the pumice meets the edge of the bases of the miniatures. So I decided not to ink the base.

After everything dried I applied some static grass using it both to add some character to the base and to cover up any major flaws in the application of the pummice. I used the same method that I described in the writeup on my dwarf miniatures.

Once the glue dried on the grass I chose a slightly lighter brown (Vallejo Model Color 983 Flat Earth) to paint the edges of the base, and then it was on to the final step of the protective clear coats. I used my standard method of one coat of Testor's Gloss Cote followed by one or two coats of Citadel Matte Varnish.

I'm rather pleased with the results. The bases are nothing special, but I think they do their job of showing off the figures without distracting from them.

I'll save talking about my future plans for this force for the next article.


Continued in The Horde Grows.