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Need ideas for Old West/Desert Bases

Any one have suggestions/examples? I'm getting ready to do an old west town and a bunch of figures for some old west gaming but the bases are throwing me.

One of the things I haven't had a chance to try (though I do have the supplies for) was instead of sand I was going to use brown crackle paint on my desert tabe to give it that sun parched look.

I was going to make 3 suggestions for bases.

First is the crackle medium that wookie mentioned. Paint your base a darker brown. Let it dry. Paint a lighter brown, mixed with crackle medium, over it heavily. Let it dry. Once the top payer is dry, highlight the crackled edges a bit.

Honestly not sure how that will turn out, but it *sounds* good. : )

Second is simple... sand.
Base, paint & highlight, and you're done.
You can use a finer grit to represent dirt.

Mix some fine grit sand (heavily) with a thick paint, like ceramcoat (acrylic paint marketed towards ceramic and craft painters). put it on your base and let it dry. After the sirface has dried, but before the interior has, use the end of your brush to shape it a bit. Leave little indentations and/or ruts that you can come back to later and fill with a dirtied up "water effects" to look like puddles in a dirt road.

Last is probably the simplest idea. Wood slat floors.
You can use balsa wood, bass wood, craft sticks, etc. to make a floor. Give it a coat of paint and a couple washes, and you're done.

Eric

All good idea's.

Any of you have colors in mind?

Wood slat floors, now that would be a challenge on 15mm figures.

Hmmm. 15mm.

Dusty, dirty. Sagebrush/cactus/cow skulls...

Snap! There you go, find some of the old "beastmen" skulls from the GW skeleton box sets. Perfect for cow skulls in 15mm.

Other ideas would be wagon wheels (broken of course) and "mesa" style rocks.

imp522 wrote:All good idea's.

Any of you have colors in mind?

Wood slat floors, now that would be a challenge on 15mm figures.

Colors depend on location.

Do you want reds, like some deserts, or the stereotypical tan colors? Mud bases would just be a darkish brown.

Wood slat floors for 15mm would be easier, I'd think.
Take a craft stick, cut it to length. With a metal ruler & hobby knife, carve straight lines down the length of the piece you cut off to give it the look of individual slats. With 15mm minis, you can get away with that a lot more than you could with larger minis.

Eric

I'm still undecided so reds or light browns are still a possibility,

That part of cutting the craft sticks wouldn't be too bad Smoothing the integral bases so they aren't noticeable might be a bit of a pain.

Thanks for all the ideas so far , keep them coming if you have anymore.

Once you make the sand base (or any irregular surface) how do you get a secure bond with your mini?

I've been gluing them down to the base first, then gluing down sand, followed by primer.
Then it's a pita to do the sand highlights and the feet.

I think it would be easy to make some small cacti with green stuff for your western bases- the smaller round ones.

astrosmash wrote:Once you make the sand base (or any irregular surface) how do you get a secure bond with your mini?
I've been gluing them down to the base first, then gluing down sand, followed by primer.
Then it's a pita to do the sand highlights and the feet.

I wait till I'm done painting the min to add basing material. If I'm using just sand on the base afterwords I actually use paint(base color) to get the sand to adhere to the base(been doing it this over two decades this way) and then once that dry's I use a slightly water down base coat(same as what I used to "glue" the sand in the first place) once that dry's I highlight it up.

astrosmash wrote:I think it would be easy to make some small cacti with green stuff for your western bases- the smaller round ones.

That's an idea.

Integrated bases. Urg.
I didn't realize that.

Yeah. Unless you cut them off and pin the feet (which I regularly do with 28mm minis with integrated bases), the whole "wooden slat floor" thing is kind of out the window, unless you want to sculpt them out of greenstuff (in which case, you just build up the GS to slightly higher than the integrated base, overlap it, then carve lines into it with your knife). That would be a kind of PITA on 15mm, though. LOL

You're probably better with built up sand/dirt.

Eric

Yeah I'm going with sand. Just need to decide on the paint colors to cover the sand.