Trench Crusade Part 5: The Base(And completion?)

 With any model, comes a good base! While tabletop ready bases is like, painted, rimmed(snorts in Uranus jokes) and perhaps with a token grass tuft, I hold that a good base should have time and care put into it. It's usual that I can take a couple of sessions to do a base(sometimes they need extra drying time, too, due to texture paste and so on.) It should compliment a model, though not overtake it completely. Sometimes I go simple with a base, like with my cavern elf warrior(a fighter/barbarian), Thanrel Zin, from PF2e: 

Just some skulls, blood and bones since he's a bit more of a chaotic neutral grim character(surprisingly, though to be fair I do play more pleasant characters as well, at least sometimes), and a...somewhat of a lumpy stalagmite(I was working with some other type of paste before I got my Vallejo standby stuff.) 

I've been going a little more in-depth with the grimdark-style bases, like on the rat ogors previously, since I really wanted to capture and atmosphere, and I find myself doing that with Trench Crusade, since that game oozes atmosphere. So I'm going for muddy, dusty, broken down, or otherwise messed-up looking bases. This is what I have so far(still unprimed. Also the Metal Slime coffee mug says hello.) 

Yeah, including one of my token inverted crosses, though the other two are going to feature other trappings. (I promise to have more on other figures, though.) Trench wire, some boards, I was trying to give the impression of this lad having cleared out some trench of faithful or something, hence the bones. (I'll be painting them up far more detailed, or at least trying to.) The inverted cross was probably him flipping one of their crosses and spiking the skulls on it. Like I learned as I've been doing research, trying to tell a little story with the base, too. 

Priming it up, I opted for gray, though I decided to mostly leave the wood-the soft wood gets stained very nicely by paints, and it'll be find to give the paint something to 'bite onto', so to speak. I have primed wood before, and it works, but I decided to try it without this time, to see what sort of effects I could get from it. 

I really like speedpaints on bases, though I use regular acrylics, too(and as you'll see, pigments.) I dunno what exactly it is, but I really like how speedpaints work on bases and over this rough terrain; it just ends up looking really good for that grimy, grimdark style, but it also works for other stuff, like ice and so on(my beloved Frostheart makes for a wonderful base ice color, with UV resin over it!) 

So I start with some nice grimy colors. Mummified Grime(which pulls its weight in this series), Desolate Brown, Brownish Decay, and Pallid Bone all come in handy for varying tones of earth and wood, with Burnt Moss giving that greenish, corrupted look. I just have fun here and lay out the colors, which I went over with a variety of earth tones and ochre acrylics with drybrushing and all of that. Added a few more odds and ends like dust via some light sienna pigment powder, a dyed strip of cloth draped over the cross(possibly from one of the corpses), and some other washes and thinned paints on the skulls to give them various states of aging and decay. 

And then finally, it's time to attach the model and do some more. Like, of course, comes more gore! Via my favorite stringy glue + AP Effect Paint method(I would like to try Dirty Down Gore one day), I put some around the model on the axe, the hook, and a scattering other places that might make sense. 

This one took me a little longer than I'd have liked, but since I'm not on a timeframe to get this warband done, I'm not too sad. I think doing a process blog for it was fun, and I'll be back with more painting stuff, possibly a gig review later(depends on my Thursday schedule) this week and whatever else!