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Exactly a year ago I made my first Trench Crusade gaming board. The Silesian Trenchline was a project of passion combining a lifetime of previous terrain making experiences with a wide array of expectations towards the game of Trench Crusade – I did not yet played at the time.
It is 2026 now and I’ve been playing Trench Crusade extensively for the past twelve months, both at home and at various events. I have tested my wargaming mantle against some of the best Trench Crusade competitive gamers in Poland, emerging that much more experienced in terms of knowledge of the flow of the game. Even though the previous gaming board is considered very playable, it is not without some key issues that grew on me over time. I have adjusted some features and added a few extras. At the end of the day I still felt it was time to ‘update’ the whole set. Thus here we are – the Silesian Trenchline 2.0 project begun on Monday 9th of February 2026.
This time around the main focus was to:
– Prioritize gameplay features over looks,
– Copy the core, well tested and Organized Play viable, board layout,
– Increase stackability (less occupied space when fully compacted),
– Maximize looks within the limits set by the above directives,
The project began in earnest on Monday afternoon, when all the necessary material got delivered at my doorstep. 2″ thick XPS foam, corrugated paper, wooden coffee sticks, PVA glue, lots of Cyanoacrylate glue and other stuff plus some 3D printed bitz and pieces I produced throughout the previous Weekend.
I copied the exact layout of the previous board by outlining each piece on a fresh XPS foam board, then cutting the XPS along the lines with an exacto knife. The next step was to fit the shapes onto a board to see if they require any adjustments. A few dimensions did get tuned slightly. I then followed up with the standard side decoration – a mix of corrugated paper and hundreds (actually over a thousand) wooden coffee sticks of varied shapes, all mounted firmly with PVA glue.
I made sure to glue coffee sticks so that they created a ragged top edge, but stuck out on the underside, to then cut them off along the natural line of the XPS foam, once dry.
In order to improve visuals in a way that will not impact gameplay comfort, I have built a few shrines and ammo caches that I then mounted inside some of the trench walls.
With all the scenery pieces prepared I have arranged a game with my buddy to see how the updated board performs in ‘real combat’. The test was a success. We both felt this was exactly how a top competitive one-off game should feel. The board was approved and ready to get painted.
The painting process was nothing new. I followed the same color scheme as before, except for the texture. This time I used AK Interactive Dark Earth, rather than a DIY mix of fine sand with brown paint and PVA glue. It saved me a lot of time. On Friday 13th of February I was done with the project – for the time being…
The board is very playable, although compared to the previous set of the Silesian Trenchline, it looks somewhat empty. I have purposely resigned from angling the side walls and adding sandbags – for smoother gaming experience, but now feel that the new board is way less fotogenic than the last one was. Because of that I am working on adding a few removable obstacles that should bring back some of that fine color to the entire thing. What do you think – how much worse does it look by comparison? How much more playable do you think it is now?
Stay tuned for updates as projects such as this are never really finished.
PS: The amazing ruined trench bottom game mat is “No Mans Land” from Playmats.eu that I helped to develop.
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To those of you who follow my work it will be of no surprise that I am a huge Armada enthusiast. The game by Mantic Games hooked me up since day one. My personal collection consists of eight fleets of varying sizes and multiple dedicated scenery sets. I went deep and beyond, dedicating a part of my hobby blog exclusively to Armada, not to mention a huge part of my life.
Regardless of multiple fleets I have been playing the Salamanders fleet almost exclusively for the past few years. This is because I really like their playstyle, but also due to the simple color scheme and a fast painting methodology that allows me to add more ships ASAP whenever I decide to test out some borderline insane lists. One might even say that in the end comfort and speed of painting won with all the other, much fancier fleets.
But my only true miniature love of all time was always the Undead. We’re talking since the early 90s. I have been collecting skeletons and wrights, vampires, mummies and zombies of all kinds in a variety of miniatures games. The time finally came for Armada to get spiced with some bones if you catch my drift.
As it happens I am a part of the Mantic Games Rules Committee and participate in the design process of the new fleets that come to the game. When an opportunity to write the Undead fleet rules presented itself I called dibs! I was given a guideline of what types of ships I was to focus on, created a draft, then playtested the ruleset extensively before presenting it to Mantic Games for further testing and eventual approval. All that to say I had the opportunity to write the rules for my favorite faction in my favorite miniatures game…
…but the rules are just half of a fleet. The models are a different story. Although Armada has a set of beautiful STL files for every existing faction available through Mantic Vault (including the Undead), there’s nothing stopping players from outsourcing models. More so, I do believe that the game is somewhat miniatures agnostic – it is the base size that represents a ship class and it is easy to track what’s what as long as players know what faction is being played.
With that in mind and being a creative dude, I wanted to really flesh out the Undead that I feel. A mix of old Warhammer with Heroes of Might & Magic 3, more bones, more gothic afts, more spikes and tattered sais… but also something disturbing and strange about the fleet I had in mind.
In the end I digitally kitbashed my own fleet with official Mantic’s files of the Twilight Kin (hulls) and Forces of the Abyss (sails, flames, bones), adding a few extras (tombstones, piles of bodies, etc.). It was all done in Meshmixer, which I learned from scratch as I went. The end result is clunky, but has some charm to it.
At that point I had a fleet of Undead ships built in advance to the possible maximum and over the top. For those who don’t know – Armada is a game of usually between five to nine ships with some borderline examples of over a dozen. Still, with multiple fleets and a multitude of list archetypes there’s ways to lean into a particular ship class or playstyle, thus covering some extremes. I’ve covered this particular topic in Armada Expanding Collection Guide for those interested, but for now, allow me to state that with the Undead I aimed at truely embracing the fleet with all of its possible configurations.
And it broke me! Because of the sheer number of ships, the magnitude of the project somehow turned it from a ‘hobby boner’ into a downer. I laid the undercoat, then shelved the project for a later date. It was June 2025 and the moment of inspiration did not come in 2025. I just continued to play the Salamanders as usual…
That is until Saturday 17th of January 2026! New year, a lot of commissions completed ahead of time (I’m already working on stuff planned for the end of May), a lot of gaming spread across the month… an Armada event hit! “Black Waters 16” is a cyclic local event I organize. This one was a blast. We had a full house with players from across Poland driving in to attend. I had a great time and as usual the event energized me for everything Armada. I managed to focus this power of hype into painting a shelved project – the Undead got onto my desk the day after!
In the end it took me about 16 hours of intense painting, spread across Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. After over half a year of waiting the Undead Fleet is now completed and I cannot wait to take it to the sea and play my very first game! (other than the beta testing).
More pictures and close-ups for every ship class at: UNDEAD FLEET GALLERY
Lemme know what you think of the ship designs, how they feel and how you like the color scheme for these bony puppies!
I hope you find this article interesting. Be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments below, or at Facebook or Instagram. If, by any chance, you are looking for a professional miniatures painting service, be sure to contact me with this contact form. I always reply within 24 hours, after which please check out your spam folder.
One of the key aspects of the Trench Crusade gameplay is taking risks in order to get an edge over the enemy force. Today I will show you an easy way to make your own sections of Dangerous Terrain – a handy feature that can be added to your trenchy gaming boards. Furthermore, below you will find a set of home-brewed rules to spice things up for both you and your opponent!
Some notes:
Useful items:
Core Features:
I cut a 3mm thick plasticard into strips of approximately 4×1″ to create bases for the scenery. There’s no requirement to use plasticard for this – personally I like how simple it is to work with this particular material. Next I applied fast drying PVA glue in the middle of each strip and glued a few cut and/or snapped wooden sticks on top trying to create a ravaged, war-thorn pattern. Finally I applied Cyanoacrylate glue on top of PVA glue and added a few 3D printed mines.
TIP: If you don’t have access to a 3D printer, you can use small size buttons or even small coins.
Texture and Volume:
I then applied Cyanoacrylate glue on top and around the core shape made of PVA glue and all the extras. Next I covered everything in K&K Hobby Village Debris, which is a nice mix of fine sand and gravel.
Base Finish:
The next step was to use a hobby knife to cut off any excess plasticard from around the hardened texture, so that the scenery looked more irregular.
Barbed Wire:
I rolled K&K Hobby Barbed Wire around the back of an old brush to shape it, then glued it on top of every scenery piece, mounted in a zigzag pattern between each wooden stick.
Afterwards I’ve painted each piece the same way as the rest of the Silesian Trenchline – Trench Crusade Scenery Set. You can read about the process in Basing: Trench Bases step-by-step tutorial. The end result:
RULES:
In order to spice things up in a (hopefully) balanced way I have created this set of rules that you are free to use in your games of Trench Crusade.
After determining who has the Initiative, but before setting up the first model, players set up two 4x1x0,4″ sections of Dangerous Terrain. Starting with the player who has the Initiative, both players alternate setting up one section anywhere on the Battlefield but not inside the enemy Deployment Zone and more than 3″ from any Objectives, until both players set up two Sections of Dangerous Terrain this way. Players then proceed with setting up their models as per scenario describtion.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. Be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments below or via Facebook or Instagram. I would also appreciate it if you considered sharing this content with your friends, who might find it interesting. Finally if you are looking for a professional miniatures painting service, be sure to contact me with this contact form. I always reply within 24 hours, after which please check out your spam folder.
I’ve been having a blast playing on the Silesian Trenchline scenery set for the last two weeks. Spoiler Alert: The set has been completed for quite some time now. That out of the way, let’s rewind a bit and get right back to where I left in the Silesian Trenchline part two article. That would be the undercoat…
In order to save time I prefer to get everything built first, then apply undercoat wholesale. This is where two 2×4′ folding tables and a set of thin HDF trays tends to come in handy. I go one tray / large piece at a time, spraying black undercoat where it’s required. I then set the tray on one of the tables and get another one. Once out of free space, I stack the trays on top of the previous layer, using small plastic cups as supports with a minimal point of contact. Fifteen minutes later everything’s nicely black.
For the painting process I went with a trusted, simple color scheme. The goal of which was to produce effective results while being easy to repeat across the entire set or to return to with any new scenery additions in the future (Such as the Antenna Cross added later on).
The core list of paints and a video tutorial following each step of the painting process can be found at Tutorial: Painting Trench Crusade Antenna Cross.
Easy to say the painting process was much faster than the building and modeling part. One to two hours of airbrushing followed by a few more hours spent on detailing. Finally a break after applying the AK Interactive Dark Earth texture on top of each piece, to come back another day and finish with a round of drybrush, apply varnish, add a few dozen Gamers Grass Brown 2mm tufts and call it done.
Although the Silesian Trenchline was complete and I had a few games on the set, the inspirational release never came. A few days later I still felt hunger for more Trench Crusade scenery for my tiny dudesmen to explore. The set felt complete and was pretty playable, but upon giving it more thought I figured to double down on some fancy centerpieces – or at least fancier than the ones I already had…
First, I added the probably most iconic Trench Crusade scenery piece – the Antenna Cross. I used a widely available STL with a few tweaks to increase playability and set the piece within my existing scenery set visual cues. A large wooden step around the base of the cross with a small sniper’s nest mid way up the cross and some Sandbags here and there made it work. I felt sated for the day…
The very next day, I had to come back to the project for another round. Got super inspired with a set of DIY objective markers seen at a local Discord – just had to make a set of my own. Nothing special, just a mix of resized 3d printed weapons, crates, ammunition and candles. I threw in a Meshmixered statue of Saint Karen – Patron of Supplies Acquisition, for a strongly themed secondary centerpiece.
Done in two hours, with a bit more work put into making the objective markers pop on the gaming board, finally put my scenery hunger to rest. For now…
This is it. The Silesian Trenchline is now ‘fully’ completed, ready to be fed the blood of plastic fighters. Will it ever get expanded? Maybe, but I already moved on to more projects, including half a dozen commissioned lightweight Trench Crusade scenery sets. I also feel like putting a lot more games in, before deciding what scenery might improve the playability on the Silesian Trenchline. If you have any fun ideas – be sure to drop them in the comments below. Until then – keep your helmets on!
hope you find this article interesting. Be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments below, or at Facebook or Instagram. I would also appreciate it if you considered sharing this content with your friends, who might find it useful. Finally if you are looking for a professional miniatures painting service, be sure to contact me with this contact form. I always reply within 24 hours, after which please check out your spam folder.
It has been a few days in the grips of the Trench Crusade fever. The squad and I had a few games, and went deep into the no man’s land. With the construction of the Silesian Trenchline (part one) we have crossed the point of no return. In order to finish the scenery set and be able to play the game for real, an array of proper peripherals and extras had to be made. So here we are…
I kicked off with a set of most essential peripherals, being the walkways, ladders and firing steps. These are necessary to get the most out of the entire trench line. Fortunately they are also fast and easy to make.
For the walkways I used two thin pieces of 3mm thick plasticard to support the length and adhered some broken stirring sticks on top. I was considering cutting the sides to fit the ‘rails’ underneath but ended up liking the ramshackle look.
The ladders were made by gluing a few steps on top of two, precisely cut, stirring sticks. I then glued decorative halved balls to fake nails. Not very realistic, but a cheap additional detail to spice things up.
Finally I used the leftover sides of the XPS foam as the base for the firing steps. These got cut into 4″ and 6″ long pieces then covered with PVA glue and stirring sticks one side at a time. Once properly adhered, the stirring sticks got nipped off. The process was then repeated on another side until completed, resulting in a set of very light, but durable firing steps.
The Extras such as damaged barrels, stacks of ammo crates etc. are great to hinder miniatures movement and provide some additional cover on the board. Most importantly this type of scenery adds much needed detail to the composition and can be moved around easily for best visual results.
I used a bunch of 3d printed elements (full list at the bottom) and mounted them on a 3mm thick plasticard with cyanoacrylate glue. I then added some small gravel and poured thin cyanoacrylate on top, sealing it with an activator. This created extra texture and volume around the 3d printed objects. I then cut off the excess of the plasticard, forming an irregular shaped base for each piece. In my opinion this makes the scenery look less artificial and allows for individual pieces to be combined into larger shapes by siding them with one another.
The scenery set was taking shape, but it still lacked the most important thing – the ‘soul’. The Trench Crusade follows a certain artistic theme and I wanted to tap into it and create some memorable centerpieces. Elements of scenery not just to steal a glance or two, but seem significant on the gaming board. To try to achieve this goal I have built two shrines, by breaking and mixing 3d printed elements with stirring sticks. I then based both of them on 3mm plasticard, then combined them with two smallest pieces of the trench wall – both of which have a straight vertical space designed for this particular purpose. Gravel and super glue followed to build volume and texture.
No proper Trench Crusade board should be devoid of Bunkers and I have added three 3d printed pieces to the set. All properly based on 3mm thick plasticard and surrounded with extra details. I used this opportunity to introduce two rows of anti-tank fortifications to go alongside one of the bunkers, further enhancing the militaristic theme of the set.
In order to push the overall theme of the set one step further I glued a few dozen sandbag barricades along the trenches with the PVA glue. Initially I planned to keep these separate, but a few test games convinced me otherwise. The reduction of modularity was a fair price to pay for the decreased setup time, comfort of use and improved transportation.
With everything built and ready, the undercoat followed. A lengthy process of mounting every scenery piece on top of a tray with two sided tape, then spraying black undercoat all around. I do like my undercoat done right after all…
And with that out of the way the only thing left seem to be the painting process, but this I will leave for the next article – coming soon. In the meantime feel free to engage with me about this project at Scarhandpainting social media or down in the comments below. I’d be happy to chat 😉
List of used STL files:
Sandbags & Barrels by DICEVERSE
Bunkers by GRADDESIGN
Tanktraps by BIMBUSPRINTABLES
Cannon Ammunition Crates by MKHAND_INDUSTRIES
Cannon Shells by MKHAND_INDUSTRIES
Artillery by ALPINEWEISS3D
I hope you find this article interesting. Be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments below, or at Facebook or Instagram. I would also appreciate it if you considered sharing this content with your friends, who might find it useful. Finally if you are looking for a professional miniatures painting service, be sure to contact me with this contact form. I always reply within 24 hours, after which please check out your spam folder.
The Trench Crusade got me my friends. Apart from the allure of the online hype, a lot of my buddies spent the last few weeks entrenched in mud, inviting me in. I gave up and fell victim to their plea for reinforcements. If you follow my blog for a while, you already know that when I get into a game I go all-in, thus here we are – I am making the Trench Crusade gaming board. Now put your helmets on and follow me into the Silesian Trenchline.
Usually, when planning a scenery set for miniatures wargaming, I start by making a rough sketch, or set up a provisional board to gauge how much scenery elements feel right. With the Trench Crusade, the community is wildly creative. Scrolling through some amazing examples of gaming boards online I got an idea of how much stuff there should be and how I’d like to approach things. I purchased a few pieces of 50mm thick Styrofoam (XPS foam), a large bottle of PVA glue, 1L of brown acrylic paint, few packages of thin wooden stirring sticks and got to work.
The core concept of the board was to have it modular, but not limited to square panels. The brilliant idea of creating trenches via stacking walled hills on top of the battlefield really spoke to me thus I went with that. I’m not one to sit down and precisely measure stuff and prefer to work fast and intuitively. The way I do things is cut a single piece of material, then use it as a measuring tool and cut the rest following the lines of the template and a piece of straight board or something currently at hand. I find minor lapse in precision working for the visual benefit and realism of the scenery set. This is what I did, cutting a single 4×4″ triangle and using it as a tool to mark core shapes in XPS. Once done I cut out the shapes with a wallpaper knife.
For the angled sides of the ‘hills’ I marked the top of each piece with a marker, following a previously cut piece of XPS about 1″ wide. This way I had the top of the slope, the supposed bottom being the actual edge of each piece. I then cut, focusing on holding the knife in a steady position and following the imaginable angle between the two lines, not caring if I made any slight errors on the way.
Once I had a few core shapes I set them up on a 4×4 gaming mat in order to see how the set ‘feels’ and how much I need to add to reach the goal.
I wanted to have my ‘trenches’ textured with something simple, but effective and look rough. I chose to go with gluing texture on top of the walls with PVA glue. For this I cut old wallpaper alongside a piece of badly damaged transportation paper into strips slightly wider than the height of the ‘walls’. Glued them one at a time on each scenery piece, then upon reaching the second round I used scissors to cut off the excess of the dried out piece, before adding another one beside it.
I then used a large synthetic brush and sealed everything with a mix of PVA glue and water. Left it to dry afterwards.
Once the scenery was completely dry, I used a portable gas burner to diversify the texture on top of each piece – done outdoors. I then used PVA glue to mount some roughly cut stirring sticks in semi regular intervals on the sides of the trenches. Finally, using Super Glue, I glued a lot of these 3d printed crosses on each wallpaper covered side, then cut the bottom excess using clippers. This provided a visually interesting setting composition with just enough detail to fit the world of the Trench Crusade, but not too much not to stand out from under the actual scenery.
The final step for the day was to seal everything again. I mixed water, PVA glue, brown acrylic paint and fine decorative sand then used it to apply texture on top of each piece. I then added a bit more paint and water into the mix and gave the sides a spin. With the help of my valiant daughter we’ve done another round just to build up volume and increase future durability of the scenery.
The pieces got stacked on top of one another and left to dry through the night, while I sat down to tinker with some extras, mainly walkways, ladders and trench platforms, but I will leave that for the upcoming Special Project: Silesian Trenchlines part two – Peripherals and Extras.
I hope you find this article interesting. Be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments below, or at Facebook or Instagram. I would also appreciate it if you considered sharing this content with your friends, who might find it useful. Finally if you are looking for a professional miniatures painting service, be sure to contact me with this contact form. I always reply within 24 hours, after which please check out your spam folder.
Welcome to the Trench Bases tutorial. Here I will take you on a Step-by-step trip through the process of creating the Trench Bases the same way as seen at: Gallery: Trench Crusade New Antioch.
Before we start, some notes:
For this tutorial I will be using:
Step one: Trench Floor
I started by breaking wooden coffee stirring sticks into small pieces, then gluing them on top of the bases about 1 mm apart from one another to leave some space to be filled with texture paste during the end stages. I then cut the excess of the sticks and filed it down with a sandpaper stick to match the base’s edge.
Step two: Rubble
Next I put small piles of gravel on the bases and poured thin super glue on top of them and in-between the ‘planks’. I then sealed it with short bursts of aerosol super glue activator. This created an irregular texture made of partially evaporated glue.
Step three: Charred Vegetation
I then broke a thin branch of dried out grape into small pieces and glued one piece on each of the larger bases.
Tip: I highly recommend sealing each piece with thin super glue for extra durability.
Step four [optional]: Barbed Wire
In order to make barbed wire I combined a curved screw and a screwdriver. I then rolled the twisted wire around a brush handle to form a proper shape. This was then cut into smaller pieces and glued on top of the bases.
Side note: For the New Antioch warband I used a ready to use product, but decided to include this DIY wire version in the basing tutorial. It’s not perfect, but it does the job and is much cheaper.
Step one: Base shading
With the modeling part complete I moved to the painting process. After applying black undercoat I airbrushed Vallejo 71.056 Panzer Dark Grey all over the bases. I then followed with Vallejo 71.044 Grey RLM02 airbrushed on top of rubble and branches.
Step two: Wood & drybrush
Next I covered planks and branches with The Army Painter Grim Black Speedpaint and left it to dry. Afterwards I drybrushed Vallejo 72.046 Ghost Grey all over the bases.
Step three: Barbed Wire base
I started the barbed wire with a layer of Vallejo 72.060 Tinny Tin.
Step four: Wash
I have covered everything with The Army Painter Strong Tone wash – Baron Harkonnen style (almost).
Step five: Barbed Wire
Once Wash dried out and done its job, I have applied a layer of Vallejo 72.609 Rust FX* to random spots on the barbed wire. I then flatbrushed a bit of Vallejo 72.052 Silver* on top and followed up with Vallejo 72.610 Galvanic Corrosion FX, again applied to random spots.
Side Note: *Vallejo Rust and Vallejo Silver are both optional. Looking back I do think I’ve unnecessarily overdone the barbed wire.
Step Six: Highlight
Next I added a bit of contrast by highlighting the sharp edges of the gravel piles, edges of the planks and a few spots on the branches with the Games Workshop Flayed One Flesh.
Step seven: Earth texture
Moving forward I applied a thick layer of AK Interactive Dark Earth texture prioritizing flat base surface, small space between the planks and some areas on top of gravel, to better set all these elements in the scene. The texture was then drybrushed softly with Games Workshop Karak Stone.
Finally I applied a few Gamers Grass Brown 2mm tufts here and there, thus finalizing the visual feel of the base.
I hope you find this review interesting. Be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments below, or at Facebook or Instagram. I would also appreciate it if you considered sharing this content with your friends, who might find it useful. Finally if you are looking for a professional miniatures painting service, be sure to contact me with this contact form. I always reply within 24 hours, after which please check out your spam folder.
Warhammer 40,000, Infinity the Game, One Page Rules, Deadzone or Kill-Team – every proper futuristic miniatures game benefits from nice looking, properly themed scenery. Where to find proper scenery for your gaming board? Such issues can easily be resolved by dropping loads of cash on original scenery elements or 3d prints. Still, why not make your own great looking and finely detailed scenery, fast, super cheap and recycle some plastic while at it?
In this article I will present to you an easy way to make nicely detailed, in-scale Containers as presented in The Colony Gallery, perfect for Warhammer 40,000 and Infinity the Game with anything in-between.
Some notes:
The Material:
It might be a surprise, but unless you are living in the vicinity of the South Pole, there’s probably a lot of stuff you can recycle into Miniatures Wargaming scenery. It fortunately is the case with the Sci-Fi Containers. Milk, water, sodas all tend to come in bottles / containers with a plastic cap. This is a goldmine of resources to build scenery with.
The Building Process:
Building Sci-Fi themed containers is as easy as gluing two plastic caps of the same size with one another. I recommend cyanoacrylate glue with an activator for a strong bond. The ‘containers’ can then be mounted on baes or used separately, depending on your preference.
For painting I recommend a sprayed undercoat. The caps are not the same plastic as Games Workshop miniatures, the paint is prone to chipping if applied on top of manually painted undercoat (or no undercoat).
The Effect:
Once done the containers can be stacked to create a varied battlefield or to provide better cover. They can even be combined to imitate urban hills and industrial areas. Perfect for any game that shares their theme.
I hope you find this tutorial interesting. Be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments below or via Facebook or Instagram. I would also appreciate if you considered sharing this content with your friends, who might find it useful. Finally if you are looking for a professional warhammer 40k miniatures painting service, be sure to contact me with this contact form. I always reply within 24 hours, after which please check out your spam folder.
Welcome to Ballsy Bases tutorial. Here I will take you on a Step-by-step trip through the process of creating Ballsy Bases that, although might not seem like it, were always canon, since the first of the Ten Thousand…
Before we start, some notes:
For this tutorial I will be using:
Step one: Landscape
I started by applying Super Glue onto a base then adding a small ball of Hey-Clay on top. I then used my fingers to gently caress the ball and shape it into a sack-like lump. Next I used a steel brush and applied pressure to add additional texture. I let it dry for approximately six hours, then went back and used a long, hard brush to smear the thick white PVA glue all over the base and seal it.
Step two: Fleshy Colors
I applied a matt black undercoat then painted the entirety of the base with a thick layer of Vallejo 72.107 Anthea Skin. Next, I grabbed a thick brush right in the middle, then drybrushed the whole thing with Vallejo 72.100 Rosy Flesh hard, then again with Vallejo 72.099 Skin Tone.
Step three: Curly Hair
There are multiple sources of natural and synthetic curled hair. For this tutorial I used the inside of a kitchen knife stand, but I recommend experimenting a bit with brushes or whatever you might come across during brave hobby exploration. I pulled a few single plastic rods out of the knife stand and wrapped them over a brush handle. I then cut them into, about 4cm long, small springs. These I have gently pushed into the ‘meat’ of the sack, followed by a small droplet of Super Glue to seal the deal.
Step four: Shag
Finally I glued a few Gamers Grass Alien Void tufts on top in seemingly random places. After repainting the edge black, the job was done. ‘perfection’
Thanks to Wargamingowy Shitposting for indirectly sponsoring this material.
I hope you find this tutorial interesting. Be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments below, or at Facebook or Instagram. I would also appreciate it if you considered sharing this content with your friends, who might find it useful. Finally if you are looking for a professional miniatures painting service, be sure to contact me with this contact form. I always reply within 24 hours, after which please check out your spam folder.
What if I told you it is possible to turn almost any old, damaged, badly painted Space Marine model into an Obliterator using trash and a bit of modeling magic? Sounds good? How about I just show you!
Before we start, some notes:
I have been playing Warhammer for over two decades now. Throughout that time I had multiple armies that I built, then painted, then sold out to get dough for another dose of ‘plastic crack’. At times I had to get rid of some really badly painted, out of date sculpts. Easy to say, I came up with a variety of ideas on how to make such miniatures more desirable in the eyes of potential buyers, one of which was turning old minis into Chaos Obliterators and Spawns. The key was to use an old miniature and as little extra bitz as possible to up the value on the gaming board. Nowadays Obliterators come in plastic and look cool, but I believe there is still value in recycling old minis, especially if you’re short on cash and would like to play CSM proper by spamming these bad boys all over the place. The method shown below can be used for anything, including turning Marines/Vehicles Death Guard, making Possessed or Mutants and more. I deliberately chose to make an Obliterator, but stay open minded and let me know in the comments if you would like to see some kind of dedicated Nurge’esque magic in the future.
Now buckle up and let’s jump straight into it!
Step One: Preparing the Miniature
Using Hobby Cutters and a Hobby Knife I removed front parts of the miniature’s arms to make space for the upcoming weapon extensions. I also removed any Imperium related symbols.
Step Two: Weapon Barrels
Next I cut an old lollipop stick and a few toothpicks into short pieces, then glued them onto the shoulder guards and arms of the miniature with Super Glue. I used remaining sharp toothpick ends to form spikes on one leg and the back of the miniature.
Step Three: Veins and Cables
I then added another thematic detail by cutting paper clips into small pieces, then bending them to form swathes of cabling. I also twisted a few to form double cabling/veins then glued all of them onto the miniature. Again with Super Glue.
Step Four: Glue Goo Magic
I followed up with the favorite trick amongst my arsenal – a mix of PVA glue and Super Glue. First I applied some PVA onto the miniature, then right after, I applied Super Glue on top. I then started ‘dragging’ the goo around with a tip of a toothpick to form veins and some sort of meat chunks. The curing Super Glue twisted and hardened the PVA glue underneath – MAGIC!
Step Five: Additional Detail
Here’s where I would usually add some leftover bitz. For this particular miniature I glued three skulls here and there to better represent the theme of ‘big bad Chaos thing’, but I invite you to experiment with stuff. I just wanted to keep things simple.
Job done – seriously. I know the miniature above looks like crap, but just take a look at this undercoated, drybrushed Chaos Obliterator below. It took me less than ten minutes to make and cost as much as an old mini that hadn’t seen action in a decade!
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