Monday 9 February 2015

A Change of Scenery

Caught up in a moment of madness I made a dreadful mistake. One that, in the months since, I have come to regret. I based all my Chaos forces using brown flock. What in the Realms of Chaos was I thinking?

The original idea would be to make them seem more 'evil', as if all life near them simply wilted away. But I have quite a gritty (unkind commentators might say 'dingy') painting style as is and I appear to have forgotten how much I needed the brighter basing to make the models stand out.

I also want to be able to freely move models and units between my different armies so having a cohesive basing scheme for all my troops would be beneficial. Especially as  now have some foundry humans that I want to be able to move freely between good and evil forces.

Meet my metaphorical guinea pig, the Chaos Hero Sally Forth.

Sally, say hello to my readers.

So, I was left with a problem. How to remove the static grass without damaging the models themselves so I can re-base them? Rather than try anything risky such as cutting the bases off, I turned to the Oldhammer Facebook group for advice. Here are some of the choicest suggestions for methods or tools:
  • Blowing on it
  • Using a 'static lawnmower'
  • Burning it
  • Having a mouse eat all the static grass
  • Using "fire... cleansing fire..."
  • Hammer
  • Chainsaw
  • Dynamite
Thanks guys.

One common thread did emerge however - using some water to loosen the PVA glue which was holding the sand/flock in place should let me just scrape all the basing material away. As the model was already varnished it should be waterproof and survive undamaged.

So, feeling a little bit silly about giving my model a foot-bath, I tried it out.

Yes there is water in there, it's just a little hard to tell

After about ten to fifteen minutes of soaking I was able to scrape off all the sand and grass with ease using a sculpting tool. It seems that even the varnish that had been applied to the base wasn't enough to stop the water from loosening the PVA. It literally slid right off!

All cleaned up

And then we've got the finished product, all ready to go back onto the battlefield to crack some heads. What do you think? Is it an improvement?

Personally, I think the grass really is greener on the other side. Time to do the rest of the army...




7 comments:

  1. Much better. I also paint any larger stones in my sand/ grit a grey colour and highlight. Also black edges of the base makes the miniature darker, so I paint the sides a neutral mid-brown.

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    1. Good idea. One thing that I definitely want to do is have more stone effects on the base rather than just the sand effect. I might see about putting some larger bits into my basing mix. :)

      I have to say that I'm quite fond of the black edging though, all my armies are done in the same way so it's probably a bit late to double back on it now anyway!

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  2. Looks good. The contrast from the green grass really does enhance the mini. Very cool!

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    1. Thanks Nick, I just wish I'd realised what effect it would have when I first based them!

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