Workshop Wednesday: Storm Strider Part 2 Making a Factory Base

Continuing from last week’s Workshop Wednesday, we’ve unboxed and pre-assembled the Storm Strider. Now to start on the scenic base.

As mentioned last week, I wanted to have a scenic base, but not like a real big one. My Nemo force will be hi-tech, all the latest and newest inventions from good-ol Sebastian Doc Brown, so I think I’ll go with a (relatively) simple laboratory or factory floor. To make it a bit more interesting, I thought I’d make the base a little bit tiered, and do a bit of base-ception by slotting in a receptacle for a small-base model into the battle engine base. When the whole thing is done, I’ll have a storm smith under the strider, inspecting one of the legs.

And the bottom step will be your basic brick and tile. I’ve reviewed instamold before, and it’s really made its weight back in gold in the easy I can stamp out easy textures for base. I’m totally keeping these brick molds, they’re perfect for just about everything. Unfortunately I don’t have a huge enough mold for a huge base, so I had to cast the base (or mold-press the base) in parts.

The top tier is like the ‘assembly floor’, and so gets a bit more different textures in the form of riged metal sheeting (plasticard) and metal plates.

I used a leather punch to punch out rivets for the floor too.

I also added card for my metal plating, and used a different instamold to get me some diamond metal hinged plates.

In a moment of masochism, I decided that one type of rivet wasn’t enough, and decided to go with another for the metal plates. These were made from pin heads snipped off and punched into the foam board. A lot of work. I will have to make larger metal plates next time.

And there it is! The scenic (factory floor) base, with a risen standing in for my Stormsmith. On to painting.

Airbrushing really makes it easy to lay down basecoats, and I did that for my bases. Decided to do the bases for my small based models at the same time, since I could. All I did was use greatcoat grey mixed with some black (since I’ll be drybrushing the highlights anyway).

Masked off the grey, then laid down a coat of gunmetal (or pigiron, up to you). I then followed it up with some copper (technically it’s the gold/sanguine base mix that the PP painters use in Forces of Cygnar).

I slathered on a really thick wash of black dipping solution (or black wash, nuln oil, badab black, really up to you) to give me my shading. Unfortunately, it was really messy. To cover up the puddling and lend a different sort of texture to the base, I then ended up drybrushing in the metals and a lighter grey (I think greatcoat/foundation grey) for the highlights. It was still looking a bit monochromatic, so I free handed in a Cygnus for fun.

To complete the weathering, I mixed up washes of various colours for the oils and drippings that you’d see on a factory floor. Green for possible moss and copper oxidation, browns for rust and black for oil. I then splodged (yes splodge is a technical term) it around the bricks, metal sheets, and sprayed/flicked the washes around as well to get some oil sprays and spills.

I think technically Nemo wouldn’t stand to have such a dirty factory floor, but I felt that a dirty base would be a much better counterpoint to the almost factory-fresh paintjob I’d be giving to my strider. And well, I like grunging things up. I’m a lot better at painting grunge than I am painting things cleanly, sadly enough.

But that’s it for this week’s installment of Workshop Wednesday. See you next week, where I start airbrushing the Strider itself!