Metals

We've covered metals pretty well in other articles so I won't rehash it all here. Keep your metals nice and smooth. For an added shine, don't highlight your metals until after your final sealant coat. Dullcote kills metallic shine. By putting the metals down afterwards you keep the natural shine. Alternatively you can bring back most of the shine of metallic paints by applying a brush on gloss coat just over the metals. Gloss medium, gloss sealant, and Tamiya Clear all do the job nicely.

Dark Lining

Notice I didn't say "black" lining? It would be a mistake to come all this way, working so hard to get all of the colors to be in harmony and then slap black lines on the color transitions. What I've done is use a very dark brown instead of black. In fact, I tend to use brown vs. black on just about all of my pieces now. My favorite lining color? VMC 150 German Camo Black Brown mixed with brown and black ink. I mixed up a whole batch in a spare flip top pot and it's ready to go any time I need it.

Here's a tip when applying your dark lining: Seal first. By applying your sealer beforehand, you protect your hard work from errant brushstrokes. I can't count the number of times I've wrecked a section at the 11th hour because my hand twitched. With the sealer coat, you can easily mop up your lining color if you get outside the lines. Once it dries you're stuck, but this gives you a good 20~30 second window to correct mistakes vs. 0 seconds.

Basing

The model is finished, now where does it stand? Well, in the case of the Umber Guard, defending the streets of Sul of course. I knew i wanted either a cobblestone or flagstone street surface. The probelm was, I didn't want to have to hand sculpt an entire army worth of bases. I finally hit upon a solution, and like many of my other solutions it involved Apoxie Sculpt.

Apozie is water soluble when mixed. Once it has cured it is waterproof. This is the key. You can actually add enough water to freshly mixed Apoxie to thin it into a paste. I initially tried getting it thin enough to pour into a mold, but that failed. Then I tried just press molding using the standard Apoxie mix. I found that if I brushed water into the recesses of the mold and then pressed the Apoxie in the water helped pull the Apoxie into the details. I won't recommend this method to replicate fine details, but for this purpose it works well enough.

So now the decision: cobblestone or flagstone? I had both molds from Hirst Arts . I set up a couple of test bases and asked my fellow 'Thralls which one looked better:

We all felt that the flagstone looked more visually appealing. The problem now was the height of the base. I wanted the surface flush with the rim of the base. This would involve cutting out the floor of the base and placing the ring over the cast piece. (For more information on how to do this, please see my Swamp Basing article.)

Much better, but also much more work. How to go about doing this? Turn the page...