Tutorial - Building a base with wood from the Forest ...

posted by roman, jarhead, kong

Another year, another day, another base...

I am recently asked so much about my basing work that i even can't answer every Message i got, guess that is the reason why another base tutorial rolls in. This time talking about using roots from the forest...

This is a forest. Now imagine Big Kong walking around there, breathing good fine air, enjoying the good life and searching the ground for great basing equipment. Always keeping an eye out for material. Always train the eagle eyes, always coming home with full pockets of strange things found and always being asked by my girlfriend: Wtf? Yeah i love those moments...keep an eye out while walking around your world - there is always something there which could be glued to a base ;)


This Tutorial again shows a process of one of my bases. First i did prepare a wondeful socket from Sockelmacher.de. I did tape it around the nice edges so that i only could make it dirty in one of those real great moments - i hope there is none approaching. Taping the socket looks like this:

 Make sure to really make the edges really plain so that no colour or whatever can run down there on the beautiful wood piece. I mostly do this with "special" sockets. I mean not those, more the so called special ones you for examples get by Sockelmacher.de.

Next step had been preparing Milliput Standard Yellow and collecting some stones i wanted to go up that base... maybe. A shows unprepared Milliput and the stones. B shows mixed Milliput brought up to the socket and the stones still lying around. C shows formed Milliput with stones in it. I did form it with my fingers first, used some water on my fingertips to have a better, softer control of it. After this i pressed the stones at place. Then i have used another stone to make some stamping action in the Milliput to get the texture of it in the Milliput. Make sure not to penetrate the tape with the Milliput - in the end this could be damaging your paintwork.

As the Milliput is still movable i thought a moment that maybe roots or something wooden might look better instead of stones. So i did search one of my resuources from the basement, where i am collecting wood that i have found in the Forest. When you are collecting wood make sure that it is completly dry before using it for a base. That means: Don't run in the Forest now and pick up some wood, run home again and glue it onto a base - that is wrong! How to make  your wood dry? Just keep it lying around where no one will be affected by the strange things from the Forest for a long while (at least 2 months). When the wood you use is dry it won't work anymore from the inside. Wet wood drys and makes you not really comfortable while painting. 

Why i use real roots and wood? Good question, bad answer: Maybe i am lazy to sculpt it on my own or i think that real natural curves and forms only can be formed by nature itself - not by mortals.



One of my collection bags looks like this:

So i have searched for the fitting parts, ripped of the stones again and picked the wood parts in place. After the Milliput is dry i checked the fixation of the wood parts by using sensual muscle power, when something is easy to move i glued it again with super glue. You now could make some hardening process for your wood but you ain't need to. I am not often doing this, but i'll tell you: Mix some PVC glue with water (50/50) and bring it on the wooden parts, letting this dry makes it more resitable against damage and while painting the wood is not soaking all your colour away. I have also put the miniature in the Milliput before to search for the place where it should stand. This one is from Red-Box-Games.

Yepp, that's it. Now wait until everything is dry and start priming. After finishing up your paintjob carefully pull down the tape again. Here are some more examples of bases where different wood has been used - if it got a surface, take a breath and paint it:

So far - Keep on happy painting!

Regards

Roman