"Faces and bases" Topic

There's an old saying in the mini painting world. Do your faces and bases well and your half way home.

Who makes your favourite face sculpts and do have any 'eccentric' basing materials you like to use?

The cardstock backing of a notepad works really well for basing. It's not too thick, it works with a variety of glues, and it takes many kinds of color, including spray paint, acrylics, enamels, marking pens, and colored pencils.

Also, it's easy to cut to exactly the needed size and shape.

I guess no one is interested in Faces or Bases Glenn lol

Faces; Front Rank and Calpe are my favorites to paint.
Bases; nothing eccentric, 2 mm plywood laser cut by a buddy.
Silica sand mixed with small rocks glued first. Overall paint a dark brown like a burnt umber, dry brushed with burnt sienna, then dry brushed again with beige.
Grass flocking, grass tufts and sometimes flowers.

[URL=http://s219.photobucket.com/user/tjm3/media/Calpe%20Prussians/IMG_7549.jpg.html]

[/URL]

I use vinyl floor tiles- thin and strong. They are 30cm square, easily cut with a Stanley knife, and readily available. The actual tile is black, so the edges don't attract attention if unpainted. Use them upside down- I usually cover in coloured paper on the sticky side

I don't really get the obsession with fancy basing. Surely the base should not be there at all – the figures should look as if they are moving on the terrain. Of course base sizes are intrinsic to most rule sets, so bases have to exist. And some peoples basing is less intrusive than others. But I can't see why figures or units should have bushes/streams/rock formations travelling around a battlefield with them.I try to make bases look as much like my terrain as possible so that they 'disappear' as much as possible.

Each to their own.

I love the scenic bases, I like my battalions to almost be little dioramas. Just makes a unit more interesting.

But it's great there are so many opinions.

When looking down at figures from above, you see more base than anything else. A scenic base looks nicer.
That's why scenic bases are popular.

With 25mm figures, bases are necessary for stability. I am moving to trying to make my bases blend into the terrain at least a little. I agree that when you look at the table, you tend to see the bases first, so if they blend in, you'll get a more realistic view.

The next big game that I'm planning to run will have a dirt-brown table cloth to represent areas of open dirt at an abandoned spaceport. So I'm going with brown flock and dark sand and maybe a little static grass on the bases. I'll make sure that all of those things appear on the terrain, whether on the table cloth or on the pieces of cloth or other material that I use to delineate woods and other features.

I have some RAFM Traveller robots, which came with circular bases that were too small in diameter to support the robots, each of which is mounted on a metal rod. I have glued the bases to card stock, but I think I'm going in a new direction, and will instead mount them on clear plastic discs, which are fairly invisible.

The only game I play that requires basing in Striker, which I play in microarmor scale. I only based infantry units when I set up my force over 10 years ago. Their bases were card stock from the back of a pad of notepaper, spray-painted brown, if I recall correctly, with light and dark flock for model train dioramas glued on. They worked pretty well with the green and brown camouflage cloth we used for a table.