Wander - Tank - base

I've been really bad at taking photos of late - the result is photos of finished or near finished things but really nothing along the way... which I really regret but... well shit happens.

Tank has been seeing some progress as testified in my last post. I figured I should decide on what to stand him on once he's finished...

Waaay back when I was still a student, hating my degree and dreaming of doing something enjoyable for a living, I got into a few contests on WAMP forums. I landed myself some nice, cast resin bases as a prize. I'd never really found anything to put on them but it seemed like the perfect time to pull one of these out and get painting.

<If I'd been better at taking photos - there'd be one of the unpainted base here>

One of my projects for this year is:

Much like SDub aka Miniac off of r/minipainting and YouTube etc. I have also been pushing myself to use an airbrush for more than just priming and basecoating. I'm still only running a Patriot 105 which is a great airbrush but designed for coarser applications than something like the Sotar 20/20 which has the ability to hit narrower areas - important for all the 28mm and small figures that I work on where the details are that much smaller. Despite the limitations of the Patriot, I love it and have also been able to get a lot of great effects on my miniatures from fast and effective OSL on weapons even down to glowing eyes. I even did most of a model using an airbrush to basically paint up a Minotaur from start to end in a single sitting.

The thing I've noticed is that I've really been able to speed up my painting thanks to the airbrush. A large part of this is getting a great basecoat down, not just a flat colour either but pushing the shadows of the figure to really give some depth quickly and easily with just a few passes of an airbrush.

So one Saturday I put some Vince Venturalla on and got down to some airbrushing:

One of the things Vince was saying on that video is that nature is messy and colours overlap. I took this to heart and it helped with the airbrushing, knowing that I really didn't need to be tooo too careful. I introduced some shadowing which is tricky as I am not able to apply my Tank mini to get an accurate sense of where the shadowing should fall.

The cast shows some real issues with voids and in retrospect I really should have filled these before I got going. I could still go back and fix it... but I'm lazy. I'd like to say it can be explained away as chipping but it really isn't how things would chip. If I can lay my hands on some liquid Green Stuff then I may try using that to fill and touch up at a later point.

Overall this was a quick job that I really enjoyed doing. There's some airbrushing, a ton of drybrushing and then a few details picked out. I may go back and muddy the cracks a bit more and lighten the tree's heartwood a little more but I'll wait on that until I have put Tank in situ to get a better sense of overall composition.

A few things I want to call out here -

• Stone is not the same colour across a single slab.
• Mosses grow in shade
• Rocks are often different colours (slab vs rocks)
• Rock's can rust and this is a great way to add points of interest in the base.

I'm far from an expert and most of this comes from the teachings of Seth Amsden who manages the FLGS I used to hit up in the US and can talk your ear off about basing and realism. His Crystal Brush entry for 2018 really highlights his skill in this regard.

- Raggy, signing out