Making broken ruins bases

Hello, this my first shot at making a tutorial so I hope it makes sense and inspires someone out there to give it a try. I really stink at sizing pictures and making them show up where I want them to so you're going to have to put up with the sloppy format. I use SuperSculpy to make the ruins, it cost about $12 at any hobby store (bought mine at Michaels), the box comes with enough material to base three armies so don't worry about wasting any.

First roll out a thin layer on a flat surface, I placed a finished model next to it for scale.
Then press designs into the clay, anything works during this step as you can see I'm showing all of my high tech expensive sculpting tools in this pic. Try to press most of your designs because they look so much cleaner than using a sculpting knife. I've even pressed skeleton heads and chaos symbols to a good effect.
Here I have taken a knife and just doodled random made up characters all over the place and used a flat head screwdriver to press designs into the clay. It's important to not take any of this too seriously because you're going to be breaking all of this up, do yourself a favor and ignore mistakes and things that don't look too cool. The key is to press on to the next step. When you're happy with it just throw it in the oven for fifteen minutes and then let it cool off.

The clay is now hard, it's time to use some plyers and start snapping the sheet into base size pieces. The nature of the clay causes the breaks to happen in really cool random patterns making every piece unique.
Glue a piece to a base and sprinkle some sand and any random bits you want.

Thats it! I honestly made 25 bases in about 1.5 hours from start to finish using one very large piece. The piece I made here will make 8-10.

I think I'll paint one of the bases all by itself tomorrow to show what the finished product looks like. Let me know if you have any questions at all. SuperSculpy is real cool stuff, I've made everything from dreadnaught parts to full sculpt demon princes out of it, I highly encourage everyone to try it out.

Looks really good. Only thing I would advice is to use 200-400 grade sand paper to "shape" surface to straight line, then polishing it with finest grade (1200+). It require planning cuts beforehand but it will look better.

I'll add it to tutorials...

Very cool and simple idea! Seeing how easily you did that makes me wish I hadn't used gorilla glue to glue my armies feet to the base; oh well. Perhaps for my Incubi/new Archon to make them stand out more. Thanks for the tips.

AE

Love the Costco card as a "high tech" tool. Nice!

Evil Space Elves wrote:

Love the Costco card as a "high tech" tool. Nice!

Membership has its privileges

Thank you very much SmallVictory, this is a great tutorial - an excellent end-result and very quick and easy for anyone to do.

This is awesome!

Helpful hint for cooking this stuff up at home... roll it out on wax paper. Then you can just put the sheet of wax paper and the putty into the oven (it helps prevent angry significant others!)

Sooo many ideas for this stuff!

Thanks for the kind words everyone,

@Local_Ork

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Only thing I would advice is to use 200-400 grade sand paper to "shape" surface to straight line, then polishing it with finest grade (1200+)

Glad you brought up sanding, SuperSculpy takes to sanding very well, doing so would give you polished/smooth tiles that would look very cool. Hopefully with paint you'll see the broken/crumbled look I'm going for on this version.

@AE You are right, Gorilla Glue and base removal is probably not a good idea for thin ankled DE. I like the Idea of elevating your characters so they stand out though.

@EVE It's the only time I can use that card and not spend at least $200!

@Gobsmakked My pleasure.

@AngryPeasant

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Helpful hint for cooking this stuff up at home... roll it out on wax paper. Then you can just put the sheet of wax paper and the putty into the oven (it helps prevent angry significant others!)

Thanks for the tip, thats the way I'm going to do it for now on.

I've totally forgot.

You can use wire brush to damage edges with it, even those around "shapes".



I've bought similar small brush for $1-something with intention to use it for my clay sculpture (for skin and skin-like textures, it works like gold with soft material, with sculpey and other putties it should give finer results).

I hope You don't mind me making some tiles from plumber putty (I like epoxy due to fact it harden on it's own but "clays" are good too), then posting pictures after polishing? I *know* how it would look (really good) but just to be fair with users that never (or rarely) sculpt stuff...

I dont mind at all, and I have a brush like that in the garage, they sell them for cleaning engine parts. I'll have to give it a shot.

That's quite, quite epic.

Painted up one of those bases trying to come up with a color scheme that works. Went for a dark stone speckeled with red/blue/gold look, not sold on it yet, opinions?

That looks really nice. Actually those rounded edges of glyphs look nice, like stone destroyed housands of feet passing by decades or centuries of heavy rain.

Mix of colours feels realistically, like real stone (not sure if builders would use "rainbow" stone instead of monochromatic marble but again "years of rain and sun" can change appearance of some stones.).

btw I'm gonna provide pics of "shaved" surface soon, however from actual model, not "basing kit".

Wow! I really like the turquoise(?) weathering. Your DE are going to look quite epic! Well played sir.

What colors did you you use?

Thank you both, I figured the stone to be of xenos origin so "rainbow" could be explained. I've actual seen a late 80's countertop with a similar palete, gold flakes and all...hideous! It's just Vallejo bluegrey pale drybrushed over black primer followed by stippling red gore, shining gold and hawk turquoise. Then a black wash over the whole thing and highlight with the blue/grey I started with.

SmallVictory wrote:

Thank you both, I figured the stone to be of xenos origin so "rainbow" could be explained. I've actual seen a late 80's countertop with a similar palete, gold flakes and all...hideous! It's just Vallejo bluegrey pale drybrushed over black primer followed by stippling red gore, shining gold and hawk turquoise. Then a black wash over the whole thing and highlight with the blue/grey I started with.

Never would have guessed the colors in a million years. I'd love to see that inspirational counter top..actually, I had an apartment with something hideous like that.

Excellent paint job, thanks for the recipe! Will absolutely have to try this at some point.

Well, I guess I know how my CWE will be based now. Thanks!

man i got 60 bucks worth of bases that look like that from cool mini. they're nicer (theres budda heads and ferns) but yours clearly cost much less.

nice work... now for some super sculpty...

These are really nice. Thanks for sharing! =)

Thanks for the props, I've decided to add one more tip. After taking a few months off being shamefully lazy, grabbing a model off the shelf and mustering up the hard fought initiative to paint only to realise you don't remember what colors you used is suuuuuper lame. But then remembering you posted a color recipe on a forum safe from your fragile memory is priceless.

Pro tip: Post your projects/techniques. It makes for a better forum and just may save you from half your army being a slightly different shade than the others.

SmallVictory wrote:

Thanks for the props, I've decided to add one more tip. After taking a few months off being shamefully lazy, grabbing a model off the shelf and mustering up the hard fought initiative to paint only to realise you don't remember what colors you used is suuuuuper lame. But then remembering you posted a color recipe on a forum safe from your fragile memory is priceless.

Pro tip: Post your projects/techniques. It makes for a better forum and just may save you from half your army being a slightly different shade than the others.

I'm getting this tip tattooed on my forehead backwards so that I can read it every time I look at a mirror. I've had to go to my project log a few times to remember how I painted that other model more than a few times.

Smallvictory, this is utterly brilliant and yet so simple! Great idea, and thanks for sharing it with us. How I just need to go steal some super sculpey from my brother who only believes in oven-fired clays!

The idea is simple and therefore perfect
I'd add one more thing to that: cast it!

I've designed my bases some time ago, made a silicone rubber mould, and cast tons of them in a polyurethane resin. I was really satisfied with the effect.

Until I saw your bases - mine suck compared to yours

BTW:

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Pro tip: Post your projects/techniques. It makes for a better forum and just may save you from half your army being a slightly different shade than the others.

I'm getting this tip tattooed on my forehead backwards so that I can read it every time I look at a mirror. I've had to go to my project log a few times to remember how I painted that other model more than a few times.

me too... I have one Wych with a perfect (IMHO) skin tone... just one. :/

Wow. I thought I'd seen this thread before and I thought it would just be cut up bits of sprue stuck on the base. But these are great. I just need to decide whether I want to invest in doing these for my army...

Ben_S wrote:

Wow. I thought I'd seen this thread before and I thought it would just be cut up bits of sprue stuck on the base. But these are great. I just need to decide whether I want to invest in doing these for my army...

Hey-that was my "chop stuff up for bases" tutorial!! I represent that
Seriously, I've seen these bases in person. They are most impressive