How to make simple bases

A short time ago, a member of the Bugman's Brewery forum asked me how I do my bases... the answer to this question gives me the perfect opportunity to write a post without showing any dwarf.

Basically, I glue small pieces of cork to make the stones on which my models stand, and I cover the remaining plastic with thickening medium to add some relief to the base.Once the medium has hardened, I use an old brush to apply water-diluted PVA glue on the places where moss or grass is supposed to grow and I sprinkle the whole base with fine sand.


When the glue has dried, I basecoat the base with Chaos black... and the painting job can start! For the rocks, I apply a base of dark grey, such as GW Adeptus Battlegrey. For the ground, I use dark brown, like Vallejo Chocolate Brown and for the grass, Vallejo German Cam. Dark Green.

I then drybrush the stones with lighter and lighter colours (Codex Grey, Fortress Grey and Bleached Bone) and paint the sand with different tones of green. Et voilà ! Two bases (rather) quickly done.

A short history of shields

I've recently started to think about the painting of my clansmen, once the first 10 crossbowmen are complete. My main worry was the shields, since I don't like the GW plastic ones and since I've wasted some of my precious Marauder Miniatures shields on poorly painted minis (I was young, I didn't know). Whatever...

So, after taking advice on Bugman's Brewery forum, I've ordered some Wargames Foundry shields and I've just received them with an additional free (and lovely) viking figure:


Nevertheless, I'm not totally satisfied: the round Viking shields seem a little bit big for my dwarves. And the Norman Kite shields blister was a real disappointment. As shown on the official picture, they're ornamented with nice bosses:

 Errr... and as you can see in my blister, they've been replaced by...  a hole :(

So I'll see what I can do with the round ones!

ADDENDUM (on November 29th) Wargames Foundry has sent me a second set of blisters with bossed shields (for free!).

Crossbowman number 5

Yippee! Already half a unit with this fifth dwarf. If one excepts the chain mail, it was a real pleasure to paint this one: the sculpting job on the face and the hands is really clean, and the shape of the helmet raised some interesting questions about the places where the highlights had to be placed to get a convincing NMM.


Unless I find a better candidate for the November's 'Dwarf Guard' theme, this crossbowman will be my entry for the Bugman's Brewery painting competition.