Lard Magazine 2023 - Part One

Lard Magazine 2023 - Part One

It’s all in the Base

Chaos Regiment Tray & Bases

The base upon which a miniature sit, for me is like the frame in which a canvas painting sits. It can be plain and simple, or even non-existent, and it won’t detract from the perceived quality of the picture however, a quality apt frame can add to the majesty of the work of art it supports. To that end, I aim to ensure my ‘frame’ is right for complimenting the art I want to create. Through learning from 30 years of experience I now start literally, from the ground up, by creating bases for my miniatures before I even paint one miniature.

 

 

 

My first major army I did this for was a Warhammer fantasy Chaos army. I needed a centre piece for this army to sit around and something I could apply the full extent of out painting abilities to. In this instance I wanted the look and feel a battlefield for the unit in question to stand upon, this was to give the added feel of devastation achieved by the winds of Chaos.

How I made these bases:

Plaster Styrene

These bases, and movement tray are made from Standard Square 25mm plastic plinth bases, greenstuff, and various bits from my bits box. For the movement tray I used magnetic whiteboard and plastic-card, with some paster wall facing I had hanging around for the edges. 

 

After cutting the right size for the bases and PVA gluing the metal whiteboard to the plastic card I super-glued the plaster styrene frontage to the edges. I then used green stuff on the bases and to smooth the edges of the movement tray. This created some small undulations; I realised it looked a little plain and added a small fence from plastic leftovers from my bits box and pushed in broken weapons and shields in here and there to add a few extra details.

A better view of fence

For the painting, I use a wide variety of paints mainly; Vallejo, Scale75 or Games Workshop. I first added PVA to apply a few spots of sand, then undercoated brown/black, and inked with a brown.

I then dry brushed with my usual flavour of earth brown, khaki and finally a pale sand. The rest of the base was gradually painted up using various other colours that would complement the unit, white and red on the shield as an example. Finally, I added some static grass.

Hard Base

Close up of 1st Zug

A project that I had always wanted to paint was some WWII Germans, (specifically being inspired by Operation Market Garden as a kid). Having done a bit of research over many years, here and there, I had noticed from old pictures of places in Holland, that many buildings and roads were made of red brick.

Therefore, I thought that a suitable change of the normal bog-standard green base for WWII, it would be a great theme to this army around the inspiration that had come from lots of streets fighting films and pictures. In addition, the challenge of painting various types of German Camouflage and the difficulty I was having getting it right on some test models meant that I didn’t actually want that hard work to be lost in actual camouflage.

9th SS Aufklarungs Abteilung

I settled on the red brick theme to compliment in the main the Autumn Camouflage types that used Red Oranges and Browns, Eichenlaubmuster or Oak Leaf A.

As this project matured and I began adding more and more elements, I started to branch out and add more detail to the bases like miniature sandbank emplacements, or hand-crafted walls as cover. I also have a bad miniature collectors habit of wanting every miniature in a range….. so I just had to use some excellent Warlord Games casualty miniatures and wound markers for my squads…. I think this too adds to the artistic feel of the overall finished army.

How I made these base:

Top down view

To replicate that red brick feel I used 2mm cork sheets, which I preceded to cut into 3mm x 2mm brick shapes and then glue to the base using PVA glue… very tedious but worth the end effect. Once dry I used the spare shavings of cork from the cutting and used sand to create patches of building rubble on the road. The base was painted in two phases. First, I sprayed the entire base black and then used several tones of greys to dry brush the rubble. I selected greys to offset the red of the brick and break up the clean feel of the road. 

Second, I carefully painted all the visible remaining bricks a warm tone of grey/off-white. When dry I followed up a watered-down (75% paint/25% water) terracotta colour. After this I went back with a brown ink and after drying I proceeded a very light drybrush of the warm off-white on the very edges of the base or raised brick, trying always to come from the same direction.  I used a watered-down orange ink to go over where I caught the edges with the off-white.

This developed an extreme contrast and the finial finishing touch was very small patched of static grass between the odd brick here or there. Overall, I think it’s an original and excellent frame.

Part Two to follow.