Basing my Death Watch

Whelp spent the last 3 weeks stripping the paint off of every mini I own(yes it took awhile).  I plan to start fresh with new paint jobs(and two new armies via trades).

My goal is to paint one unit a week if possible after school starts. However I know trying to go army by army I will burn myself out. With this in mind I am going to mix it up.  Here are my basic rules:
A unit consists of up to 10 models.
If the unit is more than 10 models big(termagaunts, fantasy etc) then I paint 10 models to completion and leave the rest of the unit for later.
For unique characters I will count 2-4 unique characters(depending on size) as one weeks work.

To help stay motivated I am going to start posting my progress up here as well as anything I used.
I am still a newb in painting but figured it might help some other people who are new as well and can’t do all that fancy painting they post online.

So I started by writing up my planned list.   It is going to be sternguard and bikers (with pedro of course).    Once I got a model count on the number of bases needed for this part I did them in one go. They are not 100% complete, a few need touch ups as well as a dull coat varnish.
Going to try painting a gloss varnish on the snow to see how it looks.  Here are the results

Did not take long time wise maybe 10 hours over the course of a few days

Edit: I found later that drilling holes to pin my men would break up chunks of basing material.  Not a disaster but had to pin everything by hand.

So adding a step.   Place whatever you are going to use to pin the men in place on the base before you start this process.  Make it too long as the basing material will take up some of its length.   I use brass rod.    Also I would recommend doing this step as I strongly recommend against gluing only to the basing material.  If the model falls off then it will take a lot of the material with it.

Day 1: Glued the small rocks to the base
Day 2:Glued the larger rocks to the base
Day 3: Put flock on the places where I planned to put snow and primed about 7 hours later(this was final layer)
Day 4: For the sternguard bases, added/cut up debris and glued to their bases and then primed the whole lot.   After waiting for them to dry for at least a hour I painted them

For the large rocks I used 3 progressively lighter dry-brushes of Grey – final layer should have been skull white.  Will know for next time.
for the little ones I used 3 progressively lighter dry-brushes of brown(will add the actual paints later)

For the snow I used, Scene-a-rama.  It was very cheap and came with good instructions.  I am looking forward to using the clear icicle paste that came with it.  The white glue that they use is actually nice because I did not have to paint the areas white first.  It gave the snow a darker look as the battlefield would not have pure white snow.

Next Step is to start prepping the actual models.  Finally got the trades done for all the bits I need.   Hopefully it will be interesting.   Will be spending most of the day Friday building and converting the unit so they are ready for painting in the fall.  I am going to start with the dark angels.

And yes there will be a bike ramping off the pile of stones.  “Man is only separated from heaven by that which he will not ramp”

July 20, 2010 | Categories: Modeling, Painting, Space Marines, Warhammer | Tags: Basing, Guide, Painting, Preparation | Leave A Comment »