Big bases for big birds...

These next few posts will show a combination of a few different materials.  Super thick plasticard, Apoxy sculpt, and some skulls from Secret Weapon.  Since most of us don't usually have a ton of 50mm bases hanging around, it may be necessary to create our own.

For the large creature videos (such as those using the Cool Mini or Not birds of prey), I had to cut up some thick platicard from Back 2 Base-ix.

I used a razorsaw to cut them.  The edges and burrs were scraped and filed down later.

I filled out the rest of the rock textures with apoxy sculpt, and then added some skulls and garvel to complete the look!

I even added magnet sheets on the bottom of the bases.

The razor saw in action... you will want to clean the semi-melted plastic bits out of the teeh of the blade.

Here are some bases for the Snowy Owls!  Tomorrow I will be creating the preparation post for them.

Now those bases need to be painted!  As I mentioned the other day, I will be trying to work in more and more of the Badger airbrush paints.  For the heck of it, I picked out some from the set, and painted my base coats on all the bases at once.

You might recognize these from Syl-Iriah. :-)

Here we see the basic layers on the griffons and eagles...

Next up, the glazing and shading, using a combination of the new Secret Weapon washes!

Show me the green! Syl-Iriah finished!

Tonight we introduce the Heroic version of Syl-Iriah, a very spectacular figure from Raging Heroes.  This is the miniature I used for the "Painting Greens" video.  It certainly allowed me to explore a huge range of that color.

Here is a glimpse of the palette.

The concept was not just to show how many different greens we could make (which is still kinda neat!), but to explore the light and dark shades, and even high vs low saturation. 

There are 3 main areas of exploration as a result.  Color range, value range, and saturation.  All of these things help to keep a rather complex mini such as this under control.

To get an idea of size, the base is 50mm.  The base insert is a design that I sculpted for CoolMiniorNot as part of their Groundwerks line.  I have a post coming up soon that shows me painting the base. 

I also have another post that shows how this was prepped and assembled.  As you find out in that post, this was very easy to assemble.  Very surprising, given all the wings and such!!

I had a lot of fun creating the "center of interest".  That was done by having the brightest and richest colors juxtaposed near some of the darkest and lowest saturated colors.

Hopefully you will also have more fun working with green after seeing the video!