I finished painting all my infantry in time for the BA0 2014 - 40 Daemonettes, 36 Pink Horrors, 10 Plaguebearers and 24 Screamers. I was proud of my accomplishment until I saw the amazing basing jobs that brought the nicest looking armies to the next level. Since then, they've been languishing on primer-white bases, being less than they could be in tabletop pop. I just added 20 Plaguebearers, and in the spirit of incremental gains, I decided it was time to base the whole army.
But we're talking 130 models here, and many of them are on slotta bases, fantasy square bases, popsicle sticks. I wanted to use this opportunity to make my kitbashed, disparate army tie together. It was also an opportunity to do break maintenance - after 50+ games, these models have lost a fair amount of arms and heads. Start to finish, this has been the easiest and most satisfying way to improve the overall look of the army.
The theme that had been bouncing around my head since the beginning was summoning circles - terrain bases look great in diorama but can look out of place when the snow troopers are in desert apocalypse city(where 85% of 40K battles take place). My daemons are already bright and out-of-place, so why can't they just move around in their personal pockets of unreality?
I started with this mystery coffee can full of quarter slugs that were made to fool 70's vending machines. They came from a place called "comp-u-mech." I don't know where they came from, but I was very happy they exist. Exactly the size of a 28mm base, heavy, plentiful, free....
I wanted to do a stencil originally, but the plasticard was too difficult to cut into the heretical shapes I needed. I printed out icons of chaos on cardstock, but I would have to stick them individually to each base. Too much work, for a sloppy looking end product.
I basecoated 20 bases pink, 20 spraypaint blue, 10 Dark Angels Green, 10 Bone White, and 70 primer white. This was to give individual squads a different colored base to make identification easier. I had to paint the symbols free hand. This looked worse than I hoped. So I added a highlight color around the symbol, then followed with a generous coat of Citadel wash (leviathan purple for Slaanesh, asuramen blue for Tzeentch, home-brew green for Tzeentch). They still don't look great. But, they were done, and the whole symbol process took less than two hours. Troops don't have to look that great - people only pick up your HQ - and the three foot rule meant they just need a strong visual note at the standard viewing range.
It ended up being nickels. At 21.21mm, they left just a small circle around the edge of the base. I hit this with white primer, then with a fluorescent blue, green or pink. I didn't have $6.50 in nickels, I only had $2.45, so this ended up being in three sessions of primering, painting, and swapping the nickel-masks. It would have been worth the extra $4.05 to get it all done in one go, especially since the temperature and humidity were rapidly dropping and rising respectively.
From here, I was able to remove the units squad-by-squad and immediately attach them to their new bases. Then, they looked amazing. The Slaanesh bases that were basecoated pink turned out the sexiest, pairing nicely with the mostly-Daemonette Daemonettes pinks and purples. My oldest squad of Plague Bearers were second, their glistening yellow bodies looking great on the bases basecoated dark angels green. On the table, the Daemon-wall is now a psychedelic assault that really makes the warp look manifest on my side of the table(coming soon to your side)!
I now need to relocate the army to give them a clear varnish dip. Durability, shininess, we're going to have it all!