Things have come a long way since the days of sand painted goblin green when it comes to bases, and every man and his dog are in the scenic bases game these days.
But can you be arsed buying scenic bases for a full Necromunda gang? Probably. A 40k army, a Fantasy Battle army….? Perhaps not.
So what do you do? Make your own.
Theres loads of base making companies that do all sorts of ways to make your own, but I wanted to try out some of the rollers from Green Stuff World.
These retail at 12 euro, that’s less than a pack of pre-made ones and gives you the means to make an infinite number of any sized, shaped bases.
These are basically rolling pins, odd concept i thought, but they work really well and theres a few ways to use them.
You get a roll, and inside the package is a textured rolling pin, with whatever design you want, ship decking, rocks, temples, cobbles, pretty much any surface you would need for most game systems.
Ill be using the temple one here, it has sort of celtic style motifs in it, and slabs, that kind of thing. Be useful for dungeon crawlers, space wolves etc, but painted in sand, it works really well for my Word Bearers as they were known to raise cultures to ashes.
So what do you do?
First up, mix up some green stuff, or whatever you prefer. I use milliput because I’m cheap and it reminds me of being a kid, I’ve used it for years, but for this demo I used the green stuff you can get from Green Stuff World.
The strips are really easy to use, just cut off the desires amount, knead it and you’re good to go. Id forgotten how sticky it is though. you place a blob on your base, flatten it down, then roll your pin over creating some really deep intricate texture. so far so good.
What I didn’t factor in is just quite HOW sticky it is, and I ended up with this;
A fucking mess. Leave your green stuff to cure for 10 minutes and use some vaseline on your green stuff and even on the roller, people often use talc too but i couldn’t be arsed cleaning that up. So be warned here, mistakes can be made.
Roll your pin over the base and you end up with a really nice, textured base.
Leave it to fully cure, wash them off in soapy water, and do with them as you wilt. I painted and weathered mine before I stuck the models on.
They look really good, genuinely impressed with how easy this is and i can really see myself doing a full army in this style. You can do massive bases too which is a bonus, your limit is the length of the roller and thats it.
I can see these being spot on for commission painters too, add a few extra quid for custom bases, they look amazing and are really easy to do and you can replicate it for as many bases as you like.
A cheap, reliable method to create highly detailed, durable, textured bases for all manner of game systems. Apart from the balls up with the green stuff, the whole process went smoothly.
I’ll be picking up several more of these for all my game systems, theres absolutely tonnes of designs. they do a range of other weird and wonderful stuff, brush tip gel sounds like it would be fucking useful for the painters amongst us, go have a look.