 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby-cheating video, and today we're going to turn this sad little blank base into a jungle base. So with our lizard people, seraphon, whatever you want to say, with our lizards recently coming out, it's become probably the right time to talk about jungle bases. You can do it, have a lot of fun with jungle bases. The animals themselves are an incredibly varied biome. And there's really not too many wrong ways to do this. You can throw a lot of different stuff on these bases, and it'll work. So here I have a 32 mil base, so basically for something like a source. And we're going to go ahead and turn it into a jungle base. So the first thing we're going to do there is we're going to use, and there's a lot of different stuff we're going to use throughout, you do not need everything I show you. You can mix. You can match. You can add. You can subtract. We're going to use lots of fun stuff. I want you to take from this what you find compelling, okay? So please don't think when I use a particular brand of a plant, or a grass, or whatever you have to go, I've got to get that exact one. No, you can use anything. Just pick from this what you like. Look for other brands, stuff that's close, anything like that's fine. So we're going to start out with a little Stirland Battlemire. Now when you look at jungle floors, jungle floors actually aren't that green. They don't look like a, you know, like a hill in Ireland or something where it's this beautiful, you know, robust green, because the canopy of jungles is so thick that not a lot of light actually gets down to the forest floor. As a result, it tends to be a lot more dirt, and it tends to be a lot more clumpy dirt because jungles are also often in tropical climates where it's very humid, so water comes down and settles and sort of remains, hence all these jungle plants. So the reason I like this Stirland Battlemire is because it's a real clumpy, it's a real clumpy basing stuff. Now, if you don't have this GW stuff or you want to use something else, perfectly fine, okay? You can make this yourself with just some heavy grit, and you go out and get like some dap, which is like auto, or sorry, dry paper, drywall paste. You can mix that together with, you know, PVA glue. You can just take a bunch of PVA glue and mix in rocks and grit and stuff like that. That's all fine. In this case, since it's already pre-mixed, and I happen to have some of this, and it makes for a nice muddy base, hey, why not? So we just kind of spread this around, and the key is we don't have to worry if it doesn't cover super well. Like if there's where this dries, and like that area right in there, where there's not any actual grit, it's just going to look flat. That's fine. You also don't tend to have to worry about leaving necessarily like room for the feet of your models, as this stuff will remain pretty soft. And so you can usually just push your models down into it and get them glued on there without any kind of issue. So that's step one. Easy. We put some mud on there. We're very much going to build this jungle base in layers. As we look at the layers of the biome, we're going to just crawl it right up, and we're going to do the same in how we build it. So obviously now this has to dry. As you can see, I've already been making some other bases. My brush is an awful mess. So I'm going to let this dry. Back in a minute. All right. Back. Mud's all dry. Bang. It's mud. Yay. You can see what I mean about how where there isn't a lot of grit, it dries rather flat. That's again, that's okay. That's what we expect. Now I should say if you want to build up some layers to this before you put down the mud, you may want to get out like your cork or something and put down a piece of cork and then you put this mud over top. In this case, I want it to be flat. If you're going for something larger, that's fine. If you want to put some big rocks on or something like that, like here, these are, you know, bits of rocks and things like that from Gamer's Grasp, they could be anything like that. Again, you'd put those on before you put the mud down. In this case, I didn't want either of these things, but as a note for you and your own base, depending on how large you're going to go, and I'll show you a couple examples of what these look like finished at the end of different sizes, you may want some more things like this to break up the space. Okay. So we have our muddy base. Great. What do we do now? Well, now we get out our old friend Elmer's Glue or PVA Glue or White Glue or whatever you want to call it. I just use standard old Elmer's. I'm going to put a bunch of that here into a pallet. Definitely more than I need, but that's fine. And then we're going to add a little bit of water. So here I just have my water bottle. Put some water in there, easy peasy. And then we're just going to swish it all around, get that water and glue mixture all nice and mixed up. Now water and glue is something that should not be underestimated. This is such a valuable tool in so many, many, many ways, but especially for what we're about to do here. So we get it all nice and mixed. You want a real, real solid mixture, so you can see it's pretty liquidy, and that's fine. That's what we want. So then what we're going to do is we're going to take that, okay, and we're going to just go ahead and spread some of it around. Here again, I'm using a very old, crappy brush. Make sure you're doing the same. Let's call it something like that. Seem good? Great. Seems good enough to me. And the first thing we're going to use here is some Army Painter Battlefield green grass. Now there's a lot of this. You can get this at hobby stores and you can get it from train stores. It's basically like the little green flock that you use in a lot of displays and stuff. Now what I like about it is it's really, really fine as you can see there. Any kind of fine flock like that will work. We want to use something like this as opposed to grass because jungle floors don't really have grasses on them in the traditional sense, or at least most don't. It's not really what you see. You'll see how we get to bigger chunks later, but for now, what we're going to do is we're literally just going to take some of this and we're just going to sprinkle, sprinkle, sprinkle. We're going to sprinkle, sprinkle a little grass. And what's nice is it'll soak right in there real easy. Then we just take it, turn it sideways, tap, tap, tap, bottom. Now we have a nice little spot of green, okay? Clean up your desk as usual and get the extra off. Okay, awesome. Step one done. Next step, we want to add some more different and varying grit. So here I have some sandy rocks that are of this size and here I have some army painter black battlegrounds that are a different size. Any size rocks from anybody will work. It doesn't really matter. You could even use a mix of just like dirt and sand and rocks from your yard or anything like that. The point is we just want to add a little bit more variance to that texture. So what we're going to do is we're going to go back into our glue mixture here. And here I'm going to focus largely especially on the areas where the muddy surface didn't dry with grit. What I'm trying to do here, if you look at images of jungle floors, they're really varied. They're so much stuff because things just fall, trees die, you know, plants die, they're very lush with lots of different textures and things like that. So we're going to take a little of the bigger chunks, spread them on there, okay? Then we take a little bit of our smaller chunks, we drop those on there, all right? We're just creating variance in the texture. What we can do then is take a little bit of our mixture and we can just tap it down right on top, make sure everything's in place, you'll pick up a rock or two sometimes, that's no big deal. We just make sure that that's nice and on there so it's real dry. Like they're so, I'm sorry, so it's real not dry, it's certainly not going to be dry. So it's real like well locked down. That way, when that PVA glue dries, the water evaporates, the little glue is left behind, boom, you've got a nice solid lock, easy, okay? So then what we're going to do is we're going to pull an old trick, one of my favorite basing materials, and that is something you probably have in your house right now, but probably don't use for basing, and that is tea. We're going to use different kinds of tea, like you can just use, especially now it's all the rage to get loose tea as opposed to tea in bags. So this is a couple of different kinds of tea leaves, and they make fantastic ground texture for things like this. So what I'm going to do is yet again go into my glue mixture here, and I want to put some on top of the grass now this time. So we're just going to flood that in there, put a little bit of that around, and we'll grab some of these little smaller chunks and pieces, and we'll just kind of spread those on there. Let's do a little bit over here on this side, on top of our rocks. Again, we're building up layers, and I'm going to take some of my green tea, and I'm going to squeeze it way down here. Break it up into little small chunks of the leaf. You can also use, if you have it, you can also use a mortar and pestle to really grind it up small, and that's certainly doable. Take a little bit of that glue-water mixture, and we're just going to hit those little leaves and things we put down, just to make sure that's nice and locked in there. And then when that's kind of wet, we can go back to our little grass mix. You can take a little bit, and just sprinkle that around, almost like sand, just kind of lock in a little bit more, alright? So now we've got a bunch of different interesting textures happening there, put a few little bit more of that one on, okay? And once again, guess what? Time to let it dry. So we have to let this glue set, so I'm going to let this sit there completely dry and lock in, and then when I come back, we'll start making it really look like a jungle. So back in a moment. Alright, we're back. So everything's dry, face is all ready to go. It has a nice look to it already. This is one of the things I'll say, so I'll kind of talk about what we're going to do next, and then we come to an interesting decision point. So it's good, it has some nice color variation. We have some dark brown, we have some grass, you know, we've got some little detritus like we would expect on a jungle floor, but obviously we can go farther. And that's where stuff like this comes into play, where we get to things like our classic tufts. We've got a couple of different kinds of tufts here, or plants, right? So here's kind of some plants. And obviously if we're going to do a jungle, we've got to have some elements like that, but of course on a 32mm base, we have to, you know, pick our battles carefully as it were. We've got to still have room for the figure to stand on. But nonetheless, let's play around a little bit. Let's start with a little bit of maybe something like this, which is actually like some grass with little leaves in it. That should be fine. It actually is pretty varied what you can get away with here. We'll just put down a little drop of gel Loctite glue, and we'll grab a nice little piece here. We already had pre-picked out. Push that down nice and tight into the glue. I always want to make sure whenever we're doing this, we're pushing that down. And then let's get out, so these are just weird little plants I picked up a long time ago. These are probably from an aquarium terrain. And what's interesting about them is I can cut out the middle part here. Let's go ahead and snip that off. And then let's snip that directly under there. And obviously you can get lots of different jungle plants and things like that, which is basically what these are. And now we've got a nice little jungle plant. So yet again, let's get a little dabble dewy on there, put a little bit down on that side too, seat that down in there, and we'll grab a little bit of accelerant over on that side too, so that dries up. And now we have some nice plants and a good little space in the middle for our person to stand. And this is where I want to talk about how we can make an interesting choice. Right now you're probably thinking, but wait, Vince, you didn't paint that base. Why are you gluing tufts down? I think we tend to think of tufts as something you can only put on at the end of a project like we wouldn't ever put it on at the beginning. And I think that's actually just not true. So you can put down tufts anytime. So this is where I said you have a choice. If you're not somebody who wants to go paint your tufts, which I'm going to do in this video and I'll show you what it looks like, just save that kind of step until the end. And that's fine. If you've got colors and things in your tufts you're already super happy with, just save it. And instead go for more plants that look like this, where clearly this needs to be painted. If you set yourself up right, you could get yourself to a place where you don't really need to paint much, to be honest. Something like this, other than this little very fakey plant that I put on here, which looks super fake and would definitely need to be painted, I might be able to get away with a lot of this just being how it is. The dirt looks nice and dark. Maybe I could put a little pigment over top in some places. And maybe I'm good to go. So if that suits you, maybe I just paint the one little plastic plant and call it a day, you know, add some extra color and tonal variation to the plant. And then I black rim the base and I'm happy with that. And there's nothing wrong with that. In general, I would still maybe put a wash over everything. That way you've got some kind of variance in there. You get a little bit of color difference. Little things like that where even if it's just taking the step of putting a wash over the whole thing can make a big difference. For me, though, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and paint everything on here because I want to really settle out of the tones. What I've done this far is just build up the jungle floor. So what I'm going to do now is go take this bad boy, let this dry, then we'll prime it out and we'll come back and I'll show you how we paint it all up. All right, so now the base has some paint on it and it's pretty simple. So I just did a standard sort of zenithal prime. And then this is just a little bit of brown shot around the edges and a little bit of green ink put down the middle. That's basically all it is. The brown was some Dollar Rowney FW Burnt Umber and the green was Vallejo Game Ink Black Green. So that gives us a nice little base here and you can see our tuft comes out really nice when you paint it. That's just quick shot of ink over that simple zenithal prime and we get a really nice variance here. And we could stop there and this would be fine. There's nothing wrong with it as with any tutorial I do, you pick the point where you want to stop. But of course we can also go a little farther and, you know, you know how it is, we're going to go farther. So here we've got a little bit of pale sand from Vallejo Model Color on the dry palette. We're going to grab some of that and just get that on there. And then we're going to wipey, wipey, wipey, wipey. And we're just going to give this guy a nice little dry brush. Easy peasy, especially the plant because the plant has nice texture to it that we'll be able to pull out. Same with the ground cover, stuff like that. We want to make sure that we just give that a nice little layer. I will say, by the way, that after I primed this, I did lay down a coat of varnish over it before I put the ink on, a pretty heavy coat of varnish. And that was there to keep all of this in place. So one of the things you want to do when you're using a lot of especially very large ground cover like this is you varnish in the middle. It will help that stuff stick in there. And when you're doing it right after you prime, you can get pretty aggressive with it because you don't have to worry about something like it being fuzzy or whatever. It'll just get down under there and it's more glue sticking all that together. So there we go. Again, got some nice variation there. Once again, could stop if we wanted. Could stop, not going to stop. Instead, we're going to go get out our friends Agrax Earthshade and some kind of greenwash. In this case, I'm going to use Andalusian Earth from Green Stuff World. You can also use your traditional Athonian camo shade or anything like that. They'll all work. It's whatever you like. So what we're going to do is we're going to grab a nice, big, big, gross brush for applying washes. I'm going to get some of that green and we're just going to stop that down in there, push some down on the bottom of those plants. We're not just touching the green though I'm focusing on it. I'm also going to get some of the green over into the brown because we want this all mixed up. We want lots of colors getting in each other's business here. Nature is very messy. Colors get all over everything because there's going to be moss that gets on the dirt and dirt that runs into the moss and then dries and leaves to tritus and stuff like that. So, you know, nature's all mixed up, right? Okay, so now we're going to take some of our old friend Agrax Earthshade and what we're going to do is we're going to start by hitting the brown parts but I'm going to go into the green here as well. So, same thing again. I'm going to definitely make sure I get a bunch down by the base of these tufts. So if you've ever seen me talk about tufts before, you never just stick a tuft on there ever even if you're doing it at the end. You always want to put some kind of like wash and or dry brush over your tuft. So there we'll get a little bit of brown mixed in there. You can see how that mixes in all nice. We're also going to take a little bit of that and we're just going to hit that plant and give those, let it just kind of flow down into the, you can see if those plants have like a little bit of a recess in there. So we're just going to let that flow in there. Just nice little touches. Put a bunch down by the bottom. Cool. Okay. And you can see how much more just with that dry brush and that little bit of agrax in there. See how much cooler that plant looks? It's a big change, right? And that's why we never want to use something like that straight out of the, out of a package because it just ends up looking fake. When we actually put the other cover on it, it'll look a lot nicer. I just realized I missed a little spot so we're going to hit that real quick. Now the goal is to just let this dry because I've got some other elements that I want to put on here. I'll show you how we finish this thing up. But of course we've got to let our washers dry. That's the only downside of that. It does take a while. So we're going to let that dry out back in a second. All right, so it's dry or dry enough. And now let's go ahead and finish this base off. And what we want to do is we want to add a little more pop to it. There's lots of ways we can go about that. So the first thing we're going to do is we want to add some more wet dirt, like muddy earth. So for that we're going to turn to some rinox hide, which is a wonderful purple brown. It has just a really nice tone to it that looks great for like deep, wet, muddy earth, okay? So we're going to grab ourselves a little junky brush here. That's all gross and that's fine. And we're going to kind of make that nice and wet. And we're just going to sprinkle some of that in here. Again, I'll go a little bit over the brown in some places, just anywhere where I think like this really wet sort of muddy earth would be, maybe we'll break up that green a little. It'll look a little different because it's so thin over the green, which is nice. Easy. Then we get some nice dark spots in there, but we still have some of our lighter color as well. We're also, we can take some of that pale sand we used earlier for our dry brushing. And let's just hit like a little rock or two. Just kind of pick some of those out. Maybe we'll get the edges of this a little bit on some light spots. Maybe we'll get those leaves a little bit up there. Just kind of hit those, make them a little more interesting. Again, when you look at this base, you're going to be looking at it. We wanted to have some presence. So next up, we're going to take some bilious green from the nostalgia 88 line from War Colors. Any green yellow will work here. Like if you have some escorpina green or scorpion green, I think is what it's called. I mean, there's a whole bunch from any kind of bright yellow green or just take green and yellow paint and mix them together. Nothing magical about it. It's just a really bright like nuclear green that I really love, especially for this purpose. So then what we're going to do is we're going to take and we're going to hit the edges of all these plants. So we're just going to trace up the edge with the side of the brush. Yes, even on bases, we can't get away from edge highlighting. The nice part here is because it's nature and it's not a piece of armor. If you get something in the wrong place, who cares? It's fine. Doesn't matter. Wherever you put the ivory, it'll be a lot brighter. Okay. Now you got a nice little jungle plant there. Let's hit a couple of leaves there. And I get the top of that. That'll look nice. Make that stand out. And then let's just sprinkle a piece or two. Knock some off. Gotta be careful when you let the, when you let washes dry. That's fine. No big deal. We'll fix that in a second. Let's just sprinkle some around there. The brighter green will make the rest seem darker. We'll let it dry and then we'll glue it back down. So there we go. There's that. Good stuff. And then finally, if we want to, we can take a little bit of something like smoke, but again, you could just use your agrax again or something like that. This is smoke from Vallejo model color. I like it because it's a really nice sort of transparent brown. You could use some Sera from Sepia for this. That would also work. We're gonna run some water into that. Really thin that down. It's already quite thin, but we're just gonna drop some of that around. Into some of the plants to make it just look like some mud that's built up. If we want to get real sneaky, we can just leave it on our brush, mix it with a little bit more of that pale sand, and we can hit some rocks again. Okay. And there we go. What we get is a nice jungle base. And you can do a lot with this. Like I said, there's a lot of different elements you can add. So here's this one that we completed. Obviously you want to black rim the edge. Here's a calf base I did. And this shows off another thing you can do, which is you can take a little bit of pigment if you want. So in this case, I have some green earth, which is a really nice sort of green brown color. So if you wanted to, you could take a little bit of that. Maybe we want to take a tiny dab of that. Put that down in there. We just kind of spread it around. Adds a nice little spot of dusty dry earth maybe next to that. You can use anything, right? All these different products that you've got become a lot of fun. Here you can see where I used it over here on this one to create that spot. We've got lots of nice different green. Here I worked in some stone pieces and stuff like that. You can go all the way up to very big bases. So here's my, one of my calf bases for my stegodon. You can see I've got some ruins built in. I've got the green and brown coming up onto the stone, big cracks with mud gathering in them, some mostly buried statuary over here, different kinds of jungle plants. Anything that looks visually compelling, little bits of wood stuck around. We even got a little bit of some skulls on some kind of wood palisade that is here in the jungle warning people not to come near. You can see how here I applied that bilious green on the very edges and things like that to really brighten it up. So there you go. You've got lots of great options when it comes to this. It's a really fun process to make these. There's all sorts of different things you can do. But there you go. That's jungle bases. I hope this gave you some good ideas. Just one more time to repeat it. Nothing about the exact colors I used here is anything magical. Any kind of like deep greens, bright greens, light browns, deep browns, all that kind of stuff is gonna work just fine. The key to a good jungle base is one, plant life. So you wanna make sure you've got plenty of interesting plant life around. Two, you wanna make sure you have a lot of earth still showing through on the base but you don't want that to be singularly colored earth. So that's why you saw me mix in a lot of different kinds of browns between the base burn umber that I used and then the wash and then the pigment and the smoke and the rhinox hide. You wanna make it seem like there's a lot of different mud going on there, okay? And of course, finally, you wanna have that green really naturally, organically covering everything because in these very wet sort of tropical environments that you're trying to capture with the jungle, you would have a lot of life and moss and things sort of clinging to everything. So that's how you capture that by having lots of different colors of green interspersed throughout. So that's jungle bases. I hope you enjoyed that. I hope this works well for your serif on armies or whatever you happen to use it for. Could also be fun for things like, you know, catachins or anything like that in 40K. But if you did like this, hey, give it a like. That's always really appreciated. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. We have new videos here every Saturday. If you've got a suggestion for future video, drop that down in the comments. Always love to see that and always happy to help. But as always, I very much appreciate you watching this one and we'll see you next time.