All your base belong to Krieg....

The 269th is gearing up for full mobilization, and they are working it out with awesome Style! This weekend General Casey cobbled together a small muster to get the blood flowing and stretch his Warhammer 40k legs and competed in the 1000pt Hall Of Heroes Tournament at our local Heroes Games and Hobbies. They crashed the party handling out the Murder on the Tabletops with no regard and capturing Best Overall with ease.

Obviously the scenic bases from Secret Weapon Miniatures did most of the footwork, this is the Origin-Story-Myth of how they were so beautifully crafted. You can find tons of tutorials, videos, or help directly from the staff if you like - for the most part I just followed along with Mr Justin. Besides a little Agrax Earthshade that happened to be the closest brown wash within reach at the time, and Army Builder anti-shine Matt spray (to lock in the pigments) everything used on the bases is SWM.

I love SWM products. Their service and workmanship is outstanding in all ways. The resin bases need a very small amount of cleanup, and not one of the 120+ we used on this project had any significant flaws or issues like leaning etc.

After a nice white primer, all the wood or metal, or anything not dirt for the most part was washed directly with Sewer Water. 

Pigments are dirty messy jerks. I use them in the dark secluded corner of my garage. In the past I have always tried to be a lot cleaner in the application, because no one wants to track any sort of pigment onto Anything else, least of all the awesome paint jobs on the actual models or even worse, Other peoples stuff! All that effort into being clean quickly wasted on any larger project, and my solution is to get super dirty and lock the pigments into both sides of the base (flip them over and spray the bottoms also.) Maybe Im just as dirty as the pigments, who cares, it looks awesome!

Most of the pigments used are listed in the tutorial. My favorite of this bunch is the Violet, a deep purple that I started with and stuffed into all the lowest cracks, craters, or anywhere the wood/metal bits touched anything else on each base.

Pigments used in this manner are fast and easy, did I mention they are very dirty? A lot can be done with very little in a small amount of time. The Violet was quickly followed with Dark Earth, not mixed, next to each other - like a highlight.

And then Terracotta Earth, Red Brick, Clay Brown, Slate Grey and Ash Grey.

Some Ancient Earth and Exhaust Black to finish off the pigments and set the top and bottom colors in just the right places. I left each color in place in all of its dirty messy glory as I moved on to the next. Once all of the pigments were installed, I flipped each base over and dropped it to knock off the excess. With few exceptions no touch-ups were needed. In the past I have always done each pigment entirely separate from any others, knocking of the excess before moving on to the next color.

To lock in the pigments and complete the pigment process, everything got a quick coat of the Army Builder Matt spray, and then a second heavy layer on the top and bottom of each base just to be sure - leaking pigments suck.

Once the models are installed some of the metal bits will get a touch of Necron Compound, and maybe a final dust of Ancient Earth to complete each model.

Thanks again everyone, stay tuned as this Army is scheduled for Completion sometime this week!