Tutorial: Water Bases for Armada

Tutorial: Water Bases for Armada

Welcome to Kings of War Armada Water Bases tutorial. Here I will take you on a Step-by-step trip through the process of creating and painting bases as can be found in the Gallery: Armada Basileans from Mantic Games Kings of War Armada.

Before we start, some notes:

• I put aside realism and focused on simplicity and rule of cool instead.
• As usual, please take note that what works for me might not necessarily work for you.

Introduction:

I plan to go all-in with Mantic’s KoW: Armada. This means a lot of ships from across numerous fleets. To keep my bases easy to paint and visually coherent I decided to limit myself to some water effects and simple tricks. Instead of going through a lot of effort, trying to build multiple layers of transparent water, I switched out standard MDF bases for clear acrylics. 
That doesn’t mean the method wouldn’t work with MDF’s. If you’d rather stick with Mantic’s bases – undercoat them white, then paint sides with some dark blue and you’d be ready to go. That being said, this method was developed with clear acrylic bases in mind so please take that into account when trying different approaches. 

The process:

Without further ado, let’s get these bases wet!
I used:

• Pacific Blue Water Gel from AK Interactive Diorama Series
• Water Foam from AK Interactive Diorama Series 
• Water Gel effects from AK Interactive Diorama Series
• White paint
• Clear acrylic bases

Step one:

I used a large brush to apply AK Interactive Diorama Series: Pacific Blue Water Gel onto entire surface of the base. I then stippled a bit to create an uneven surface. Lastly I used a finger to remove the excess gel from the sides of the base.

Step two:

I repeated first step two more times, leaving the paint to dry between each repeat. This darkened the base significantly and resulten in a nice solid layer with a lot more detail on top of the first one.

Step three:

Once I was done painting ships I applied AK Interactive Pacific Blue Gel at the edges of each ship’s underside. I then followed with Super Glue through the middle and glued the ship on top of a base. Excess gel was queezed out and filled any holes between the ship and the base.

Step four:

I then applied more Pacific Blue Gel around the ship. It was a bit messy so I used a clean flat brush to move any excess gel from the ship’s sides and onto the base.

Step five:

Some time later I applied AK Interactive clear Water Gel effects around the ship. I used a small brush and slowly built the mass of splashing water at the front and on the sides of the ship. This time I didn’t care about messing up the hull.

Step six:

Next I applied AK Interactive Water Foam. Using a small brush I applied small dots of the effect on top of previous layer. This one is very white so I tried to avoid applying to much. Mistakes were removed with a clean flat brush – pushed into more tight lines, where necessary.

Step seven:

Lastly I mixed white paint, water and AK Interactive clear Water Gel effect and stippled a bit behind and around the ship to create a nice effect of dissolving water foam. 

Task complete! The fleet is now sailing into the unknown. I hope you like this tutorial. For more pictures of finished fleet visit Gallery: Armada Basileans

Be sure to let me know your thoughts on the method either in the comments below or at my facebook profile. 

Please link this tutorial to anyone who likes to learn new hobby tricks. 

Lastly I also invite you to follow me at Instagram, where I drop some nice pictures from time to time.

All speed ahead and see you in the next article!