 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about painting a Martian base. So this is a follow on from our last video where we assembled this base and you can see this is just picking up right where we left off at the end except we've primed it up. You saw this in the picture at the end of the last video. This was done with just some black primer, my standard I should say German gray primer. And then we took some white ink and kind of created a pseudo zenith of a little point of interest in the center and basically got that going. Now one note on this, I did then lay a pretty heavy layer of varnish over and the reason I did that is because we're going to be dry brushing this bad boy like crazy and when you use this crackle stuff like Martian iron earth or things like that, you want to make sure that it's just a good extra step to make it all kind of stick. That's a nice heavy coat at this point after the primer stage just seals everything in gives you some extra durability for later steps. You'll see here how where we put the two over top of each other where I put the crackle the Martian iron earth I should say over the other pit basing paste I used, you can see how the effect that I mentioned in the last video where it pulled apart got really strong. So like I said, it's a great trick. If you want to get these big giant cracks like this, you use two different pastes that have two different drying times. So in this case, this was the Vallejo plus the Martian iron earth. So at any rate, paints we're going to use today. Bada boom. We're going to keep this nice and simple. We're going to use some red earth from Daler Rowney FW. We're going to use some smoke from Vallejo and then we're going to use some ivory from Proacryl because why not? Those all seem like fun things to do. What we're going to do to start is just we're going to get all three colors on our palette. I'm going to bring that into frame and you'll see how we're just going to go nuts because basically we're just going to wet blend the heck out of this and have a good time and see what we can do. One of the fun things about basing is because it's usually nature more often than it's something technical or inorganic, that is to say our miniatures are often standing in an organic place in the world. All right, so there's my palette. It's going to be really ugly in the frame, so I apologize for that. But I'll show you what is going on here. Okay, so one of the great parts about it is it's a great chance to do some wet blending. So we're going to get a nice big brush. This is our big old size eight kind of old crappy brush. We're going to take some of that red ink, okay, and we're just going to start slapping that all around. I really like red earth for Martian bases. It has still quite an orange tone. Just works well over as anethyl. It's a nice situation to get some of that brown going in there. And that's one of the keys. I oftentimes will see people just sort of paint their Martian bases to be almost completely just red. And like, you know, yeah, sure, Mars has a lot of red iron soil, but it's not like that's all it is. And adding these variations in here where we've got a little bit of browns, a little bit of, you know, sort of reds and stuff like that, we'll get a little bit of that ivory in here and start working some highlights up so you can see how I'm just wet blending it right in. I haven't went back to the water, haven't changed my brush, nothing like that. You can see how I get this nice variation across the base. That smoke is a wonderful nice earthy brown color. The smoke from Vallejo, I'm not sure if it's still available or not, but it's a great paint. It's very, very useful. You can use it for like weathering on stuff. It's got a lot of great uses. If you put it on top of metal, it'll look a lot just like kind of streaky old, like streaky old weather stains. So it's just a just a great, useful paint. Grab a little bit more ivory. We'll kind of build that highlight up a little bit there. Maybe pull a little bit of that toward the front of the base. Right. Grab a little more of that red, a little more of that brown, and boom. There we go. We've got our base. Oh, we've got our base nice and base coated. And you can see we've got these nice transitions going everywhere. It's all wet blended. We get these smooth, interesting transitions happening. So there's a lot of paint on there, so now I'm just going to let that dry. And we'll be back in a moment. We'll show the next step. So back in just a second. All right, we're back. And it's dry enough. You can still see it's a little wet, but that's fine. So now what we want to do is we want to bring back some of the detail after that wet blend. And so the way we're going to do that is with our old friend, the dry brush. So I'm going to grab a little bit of that ivory that I used before. I'm going to just grab a little bit of that, wipe off our dry brush. And then very lightly, what we're going to do is just give that a nice little dry brush. Just pick up those edges. You notice I'm barely touching the base. You can see how paint comes off. One of the problems people often make with dry brushing is they just try to go all in in step one. They just want to go and have it be done. When really the secret is you want to be kind of gentle with it. Let me just let the paint naturally come off of there real slow. Lots of light touches back and forth. That'll also give you a much more natural effect. You get less streaking. This is definitely true on miniatures as well. Whenever you're doing an actual dry brush on a miniature, which there is absolutely nothing wrong with, get yourself a good makeup brush, have very, very little paint on the brush and just let it really naturally just slowly come off of there. Now you can see how we get that nice dry effect. And that's what we want. We want it to feel lacking of any water. This is supposed to be a Martian landscape, right? The whole point of it is there's no more water. There is. It's just frozen at the caps or whatever. The next thing we're going to do is go to our old friend, the pigment palette. So if you've been seeing previous videos, you know that I keep a bunch of pigment, just dry pigment here out of various pigment kits in our pigment packs in just a palette. I keep it off in a safe spot because you don't want to knock this over or sneeze in it. That would be a real mess. But I have lots of reds to browns here, which I'll frequently go into. And this is one of my rust colors. So you can get this out of like rust packs, any rust pack of pigment. It's a great pigment for these sorts of bases. So we'll just kind of push some of those that in there. I want to give us some nice deep color back. Let's grab a little bit of this brown and dark gray over here. And let's go ahead and force some of that maybe down in these deep areas here, okay? Then we'll just wipe off our pigment brush. And then we'll just blow off some of that excess, just smooth it around. You can see how, again, because that raw pigment is so dry, it's just going to, again, grab a little deep black there, maybe get some of those really deep recesses, create some really nice contrast, wipe off the brush, smooth that out. You can see how we get some nice red, just kind of mix all that around. Basically, we're dry blending with pigments, just kind of moving it around. Now, we obviously have to lock in the pigment. Well, you do that in a lot of different ways. In this case, we're going to take a little bit of our dry brush again, and I'm just going to kind of dry brush over all that. And I'll pick up some of the pigment as I'm going. That's just going to naturally happen. That's okay. It'll also give me a little paint. Let's actually stab a little bit, do some circular dry brushing. Okay. Now we've got a nice landscape there with some good variation. Then we want to kind of lock all that and bring everything together. So for that, we're just going to go to our old friend, Agrax Earthshade, wonderful obviously for many purposes, but especially for something like this. So if we get that nice and well shaken up, and then we're going to get down in there, get a good amount of that Agrax on there, that's going to really get in all those cracks in our, I'll go over the skull here, by the way, and just wipe him off. So that way we don't, that way we keep the top of him like that. So it stays there. It's going to get all the nice cracks in that Martian Iron Earth, make it really stand out a little more. So we just get a nice coat of that wash on there, getting kind of heavy, making sure it gets down in all those little cracks. Don't want any sort of unreasonable pools happening anywhere, like on these flat surfaces. We want to make sure a nice amount gets down there. So there we go. Now we've got that all washed up. You can see how that flowed down, especially in those cracks between that earth there that looks real nice. So now we just let that dry one more time and then we'll come right back and we'll finish it out. All right, we're back. We're going to finish off this bad boy. You can see the wash is now dry and we've got some really nice color going here, but it's still not quite, like it's not quite Martian enough. It's red. It still looks a little too just like mud. So we're going to do a couple of things. First we're going to grab a little bit of that white on our dry brush and I hear what you say in Vince. Why do you keep doing this over and over again? Why not just do it one time? Well, you can. I mean, you can do as many times as you want as with any of my things. You can always break it up or, but I'm just showing you kind of how I would do the full process. And here instead, you notice I'm going to use a lot of like stabbing motion. I'm not just dry brushing. I'm also going to kind of mix in a little stippling here and there. We just do a little bit to kind of pick out some of those elements there. Okay. All right. Then we're going to go back to our red earth and we're going to grab a little bit of that ink. At this time, it's going to have a little bit of water in it. We've got some water in the brush and we're just going to kind of work that around. We're going to avoid some of those edges where we just put white. We're going to just kind of hit those areas, trying to hit some of the places where we put that white because that white will just nicely pick up that red really, really strongly, whereas some of the darker areas will more or less ignore it. So we just kind of reinforce that. We glaze back over some of those and you'll see how those areas pick up that red. And now we've got this nice red crust to everything, but we still got a nice dry edge. Right? So it just gives us a great final finish on everything. If you wanted, you could go back and again do another light dry brush or something like that. Keep going back and forth as many times as you want. Finally, we've got our little Skull over there who's basically done. We'll give him a little bit of a touch of that red. We'll grab a little bit of that ivory. We've basically painted this guy for free by just all the dry brushing and washing. We'll just mix a little bit of that red in. Cool. Skull's done. Like all that back and forth, we basically got the Skull for free. So hey, good times. There you go. That's it. That's how we paint up our Martian base. Edge the base in black or a dark gray or something like that and you're good to go. But that's more or less to say what, I'm going to give, we're going to do one more little quick thing here because I'm looking at it and I just, you know what, nothing, we never stop. We never stop. I just want to hit one side with a little stronger dry brush. Oops. There we go. Just create a little more variation. So it looks like that side's a little more dry. Little touches sometimes make all the difference, but there you go. That's how we do our Martian base. You can make it more red, less red. I like mine to be quite dark, but the point is to have some kind of variation between not just a big red base, but to have those darker browns and blacks and stuff like that in there so that it, you know, Mars is mostly red because of all this extra iron in the earth and the lack of water and vegetation and all of that, but it doesn't mean we have to just be completely red. We still want it to feel like there's variation at both from a texture perspective as well as from a color perspective because there would be still different types of earth that had higher and lower amounts of iron in the soil. So there we go. It's also just more visually compelling to look at than a big, silly red base. So that's that. So that's how we do a Martian iron earth base. Like it if you get, or give it a like if you like it, subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. If you have suggestions for videos you'd like to see, go ahead and drop those down in the comments. This came from a viewer suggestion, and those are always greatly appreciated. If you have any questions, of course, drop those down there as well. But as always, I very much appreciate you watching this one, and we'll see you next time.