So time for another tutorial! I was looking around and saw loads of different base tutorials but I could never find a good fairly simple one for concrete/city bases! So I thought id have a bash myself and these are the results. As with all of my tutorials I will try to keep the materials readily available and make the process fairly easy!
The materials you will need:
1. Oven Bake Clay (I use Super Sculpey Original personally)
2. Sand
3. Your bases
4. 1 Small Plasticard sheet(optional)
5. Black Primer Spray
6. Dark Grey and Light Grey paints
7. Yellow and White Paint(optional)
8. Toothbrush (this is optional but make sure its a spare one!)
9. An Oven
10. A little bit of Flour and a Rolling Pin
11. PVA Glue
12. Scissors
13. Super Glue
A little information on the oven bake clay first. I use Super Sculpey personally and the best way to describe this product if you’ve never heard of it is that its like plasticine in consistency. You can work the clay as much as you like and when you are happy you bake it in the oven to make it go hard.
Getting Started
You need to work the clay in your hands until it comes a little more workable, make sure you’ve got a good palm sized ball, when you’ve worked the clay and its a nice ball you want to take the flour and dust your worktop. When you have dusted the worktop take your rolling-pin and roll out the clay until it’s about 1mm in thickness, the flour is so that when your turn the clay or try to pick it up it wont stick to the side and tear.
Now when you have done this you want to put it in the oven. The time and temperature you bake the clay at will vary on the brand you use. For Super Sculpey its 130C and 15 minutes for every 6mm so I baked my sheets for 6-7 minutes, while the sheets baked a took the time to make multiple sheets
The sheets will be hot when they come out of the oven so take great care when handling them, they will also be slightly malleable still as well so I chose to lightly apply a rolling pin again to smooth out any curls.
Next step is to take the sand bases and PVA and stick the sand to the bases do a full coverage on the top of the bases, most of this will be covered later but its best to cover the whole base like so.
Now you’ll need to wait for these to dry or if you are impatient like me bake the bases on a very very low temperature in the oven, I use the very first heat setting if you do this too high you will melt the bases so be careful!
Hitting the Road
Now when everything is dry and cool you want to take the sheets of hardened clay and break off a base sized piece and use your scissors to trim the piece to size but putting in jagged lines and nipping at the sides to give a broken look. To vary the bases up gently take your scissors and cut the piece in half in an uneven pattern, gently do this and remember where you cut as you’ll want to glue these pieces next to each other in the base like so…
Now you’ll be able to feel the texture of the clay and you will notice its not entirely smooth which will give us a nice textured finish, when the glue has dried then spray all the bases with your black primer making sure you get a full coverage.
Its time to start applying paint now so take your darker grey and cover all the edges of the clay including all the sand areas, you can apply this however you want I used an airbrush personally for the short amount of time it takes.
Next we want to take our lighter grey and apply it to the centre of the clay sections again I did this with an airbrush but you could do the same with a sponge or by drybrushing the colour on, this will give us a two toned look and make the bases start to pop a little and not seem so flat.
As you can see the bases now look a little more alive and natural if you want you can stop here but lets take things a little further and make them a bit more vibrant so we want to take our small plasticard sheet and cut out some road marking shapes I cut out a long section and some smaller ones to act as road markings as you can see this will make a stencil to apply over our bases with the coloured paint
Now take the stencil and apply you paint through the stencil gently as if you use too much you will get run offs and smudges on to your bases, once you’ve done this wait for the paint to dry and use the toothbrush to scrub the colours to give the lines a more distressed and worn look
That’s all there is too it! you can leave the edges of the bases grey to tie in with the top or paint them black for a little more definition, i paint mine as I have all my base edges black, and here is a picture of what they look like with models on.
I hope you liked the guide and thanks again for reading!
Mark / LemonPainting
