After my first experiments with Renaissance Ink's flocking gels, I couldn't stop thinking about something I read on the company's website:
[The flocking gels] may be painted once dry or mixed with Renaissance Ink paints for custom pre-colored terrain.
So, I thought - instead of spreading the gel out to texture the base, and then painting it, what about pre-coloring the gel?
And fortunately, I had some 15mm Blemmye to experiment on. I wanted them to be from North Africa, so I wanted to go with a desert look...
The already painted Blemmye were mounted individually on ½" steel bases. The cast-on bases were painted green. My plan was to cover the bases with tan-colored flocking gel - so I mixed some tan-color paint into Medium Flocking Gel, and started spreading...
The process worked out pretty quickly, though I had to take more care than before, since I didn't want to get the gel onto the rest of the figure and "paint" it tan. It was difficult to work the palette knife in-between the figures' legs - but since the cast-on base had some texture, I figured I didn't need to. I could blend everything together later with a little paint. While the gritty gel was easy to apply, accuracy was sometimes a problem - I'm sure I buried more than one Blemmye foot in the process!
When the flocking gel was dry, I touched up between the legs with the same color of tan paint. Then I drybrushed the base with a lighter color of tan, and sealed everything with a coat of Dullcote.
For such a quick process, I was pleased with the result:
Note that the Blemmye are resting on a tan-colored magnetic movement tray.
One surprise is that the texture turned out differently than it did with my wizard experiment - instead of being granular, it is rough and craggy. I have no idea why it turned out differently this time - must have been something I did.
Also, if you look carefully, you can see that I was wrong to think that the cast-on texture and the flocking gel texture would mesh. You can distinctly see the difference at the edges, compared to between the feet. (If you look carefully, that is - it wouldn't be visible in normal game-play!) Next time, I think I'll try to spread the flocking gel across the entire "ground" area of the base.