 Hello, everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video. Today it's time to return to basing. Let's head into the Chaos Wastes. Let's get into it. The strict techno-mancer that is Vinci-V. Let us get to the technique and learn it... So today's base is going to be relatively simple. It's about making a wasteland base that looks appropriate for the forces of chaos. We want to keep it simple, and I want this to be something you could easily replicate across your whole army. Now, I'm going to be working on a relatively large base for a figure today, just because it makes it easier to see on camera, but everything I'm doing here could be easily replicated all the way down to even the smallest bases and broken up. I wanted to give you something that you could mass produce easily, but would still look very eye-catching and impactful on the tabletop and feel like the forces of chaos were marching across it. So let's head over to the desk and let's get this base built and painted. So we're going to be working today on an 80mm base. Let's talk about our materials. So these are little crushed glass beads. I got them at a garden store. Yeah, it's just broken up colored glass. These are bigger chunks of broken glass. They're not sharp in any way, because of the way they're rolled around and stuff. There's no sharp edges. You don't cut yourself. And then finally, it's some very finely ground... Well, not super finely ground, I should say, but like medium ground sand. And I actually like that sand because it has more of the texture of rocks. Again, all of this is from a garden store, just your normal garden center area. So look around and see what they have. A specific section that you can look in. It's become very popular for people to build these fairy gardens for their outdoor gardens. And so hence, there's a bunch of stuff that's in those gardens that's in scale. People use for rocks and things like that. I have found that to be a goldmine of basing materials that are very, very, very cheap, because people are normally building things that are quite large. So I start by spreading this sand over some super glue. I could have used PVA glue, but I wanted it to dry a little faster, and super glue works just as well here. It actually looks like pretzel salt. That's what it looks like to me, but trust me, it won't look like that once painted. But I just make sure over a couple applications, you know, puts more glue on, puts more of this big rocky sand on, and we get to a relatively good place. Now, I don't want to leave just that. I also want some finer texture. And one of the keys with sort of any kind of outdoor base is to often mix your textures. So here I'm using super fine ground sand and just mixing it into some of the open spots. I'm not making it regular across the thing. I'm not trying to cover all my work. I just want there to be some variation in the natural texture of the actual base. That will both make it feel more realistic as sort of rocky barren earth, but it'll also just make it more visually appealing as well. Once we're all done, tap off the excess, and there we go. You can see how we get these different patches of textures. Next up, let's go ahead and get some rocks on. And that's what these crushed glass things are. They're just rocks. They're perfect in scale rocks. And the texture on these, because the way they're cut or broken or shattered or however they're made, I don't know, but they have this wonderful sort of striated texture that really makes them feel like natural in scale rocks. So there I just glue them down into what I think are some interesting positions. The area that's marked out on the base, by the way, is where the figure is going to attach. I set him down and then drew the circle that way. I knew roughly where he was going to be and I didn't put material down over top. Once my big rocks are in place, then it's time to do some small rocks. This is just the smaller crushed glass, but again, the same thing. You get these wonderful edge textures and this crushed glass kind of a broken glass or whatever you want to call it. Please don't just break glass and then try to do this. It's very sharp by the actual stuff. It's only a few dollars at your local garden store. I don't want anybody cutting themselves or anything. But this stuff is perfect for just doing like lots of different scale. And the hope here is between the big rocks, the big pieces of glass, these medium ones, then the sort of white pretzel salt looking stuff, and then the fine sand. We really have a complete biome of this sort of rocky wasteland earth created where we're seeing how the earth is broken down from these large, rough, sharp, jagged rocks into this small finely ground stuff. But of course, no wasteland would be complete without some cracked earth. So our final step here is again to pick some interesting patches, not the whole thing, and apply some Martian iron earth. Now you can use any kind of crackle paint or medium I happen to have this stuff and I like it and know how it works. It is a bit expensive, but when you're using it in sort of small amounts like this, it's relatively manageable. I just create some patches of it where I think it'll be visually interesting around the miniature and apply it very, very thickly. Notice how thick that little glob is. If you want it to really crack, then it's got to be thick. So I leave like the central area is very thick. And you can see then we get those nice cracks over the whole thing. It really looks like that barren, wasted earth. No cast wasteland would be complete without skulls. So we have to go to the best terrain kit GW has ever made. The skulls box couldn't recommend enough. And let's add a few more skulls to this base. The miniature itself, how it connects to the base actually has a skull on its base as well. So we'll just have skulls everywhere as would be appropriate for the forces of chaos. Once we get our skulls in place amongst these rocks, we have a nice, simple, easily repeatable chaos base. Remember what I've got here is just sort of a sample of the kinds of things you can do. When you think about this chaos wasteland, you could also have bits of fallen soldiers, broken swords, broken shields, all those kinds of things can do incredible work. You could have little, you know, fallen chaos stars and emblems and rusted ruins and all those kinds of things can be used if you want to take this up to the next level. My goal here again was to keep this relatively simple to where you could replicate this if you need 20, 50, 100 of these bases for your chaos armies. But feel free to spice this up. You know, get crazy. You could have some tentacles on the base. You could have, you know, puddles, a sort of strange colored goo that feels very chaosy. Really, the sky is the limit here. So wherever you feel like setting your ceiling, you should do so as you replicate this across your army. I do love how priming brings everything together. And you can see how once this base is all primed and ready to go, of course, everything now looks appropriate. You can see how the rocks really do look like rocks now that they're no longer sort of pseudo-translucent. I'm going to start by just laying down a little bit of thinned rhinox hide. I think this is a perfect color for sort of a chaos wasteland mud. It's very dark. It has some like purple tones in it. I just like what's going on and it gives me a nice base to work from. Once that's done, I'm going to lay down a little bit of this sort of jade blue-green onto the rocks. And again, here's where we get super important. When we're dealing in the chaos wastes and chaos wastelands and these kinds of things, we want there to be color, visual interest, things going on that are more than just black and gray. Rocks do not need to be gray. In fact, most of the time, they should not be. Very few rocks in nature are actually just gray and white. So instead, we're going to start from this base green color and that'll give us something really interesting and visually poppy on the base against our desaturated dark brown earth. I give it a nice dry brush to basically pop out some of the texture and details and get some of those initial edges of the rocks popped up. I focus a lot of my dry brushing on the front of the base. What will be sort of the visual front. It's hard on a round base. But I want to make sure that's the brightest area. You can create interesting travel of light and shadow just by choosing where you dry brush more versus less. Next, I'm going to work some colored pigment in. I pick both blues and reds here because again, chaos. It should have the sort of hints of other color iron oxide and blues and stuff like that that make the ground look more visually interesting. Now it's going to be really strong when I initially apply it, but that's okay. Don't worry. We're going to kill a lot of that out with our next step. Our next step is to give the base a sort of wash of Agrax Earthshade. This is the new mix so it'll really run into the recesses. I am washing the skulls and the ground. I am not washing the rocks. I don't want to get brown into my cool blue-green rocks. That's kind of the opposite of the color I want. Those are meant to be cold and to contrast against the warmer earth underneath them. Again, we're always looking for more ways we can work in that contrast. Now it's time to actually paint the rocks. We've got that base coat down. We've got a little bit of the edges picked out, but now we're going to just start working roughly. I've got a big fat brush. You'll see me use a couple different brushes over the course of this. But the idea is pretty simple. Let's wet blend out some interesting transitions on the rocks. Make them look more visually appealing. I want them to pop up into a sort of warm white. So again, they're sort of a warm base. Then it goes into the brown, then it goes into the cool rocks itself, and then up to the very warm highlights. This also matches the same highlight color I used on the figure that is going to go on here. So really just trying to create that overall ambience of a vaguely warm light. So what I do is just keep refining the rocks, popping out edges, pulling out texture, glazing on them, just making them like visually interesting. There's no singular thing you have to do here. What I really wanted to show you is that rocks are a really fun thing to paint. I sound stupid, but I really enjoy painting rocks because you can use almost any color. Here I'm using green to a sort of off ivory and this sort of blue-green into ivory, and it just makes for something that's really visually compelling as it stands out on these rocks. And you know, if you go out in nature, there's just rocks of every color you can imagine and with every color infused into it because nature's real messy and elements of all different kinds or different colors and get worked into these rocks. So have fun, experiment, play around with textures, stipple, scratch, hash, dash, dot, and it will really make for a more interesting visual presentation of your base. The next thing I do is I actually find those areas that cracked under the crackle medium and I'm going to paint those roughly the same as the rocks themselves. I want it to seem like the cracked earth is almost like these rocks have emerged up out where that cracking is happening. Again, it helps to both break up that brown over all of the base, but it also helps to then tie the individual rocks into the ground. Toward the front of the base, I then do some light dry brushing with the exact same mix as my highlight color on the rocks just to bring it all into the same visual spectrum and add a little more visual contrast and travel as we get toward the front of the base cooling it off. A little final extremely light dry brush just to pick out the very edges and everything like that over the rocks and some of the just a little bit of the dirt here and there, especially toward the front and we're all set there. The last step is the skulls, just getting those nice and painted and picked out, making sure that those just kind of pop, and that's just working around with some of the ivory tone here that I have, as well as some of the browns. Once that stuff's all done, then of course I want to do one more final pass with pigment. The pigment will always get killed by your wash, so I go back in and I'm going to sprinkle some of that red oxide. Because my rocks are infused with a little bit of green, this very weak desaturated red will be yet another place of light visual contrast. All these things are very desaturated, but they help sell it. Now that the miniature is attached, I need to sort of hide the line there where his little rock went into the space, and I can do that through both putting down a little more sand, which I did already, but as well I can put down some tufts and things like that. So I'm just using some dead grass tufts. These have basically no life in them, which would be appropriate for this chaos wasteland. Only the most rugged and dead plants. Each of these tufts gets a little wash around its base, and then I take that same highlight ivory color that I used on the skulls, on the model, on the rocks, and I give the tufts a nice dry brush. Doing things like putting a little bit of drop of wash into your tufts and around them at their base, and then dry brushing the tips of them with the same highlight color as you used around the miniature help to really integrate them into the environment. And basically there you go with some final quick touches and last highlights just to make sure those rocks really stand out now that I see everything all together. This base is finished. Ready to go, ready for my warlord. There we go. The base is all done. The centurion is all attached. This guy is ready to lead the forces of chaos. This is kind of, as I said, I like this basing scheme because it is pretty simple, but it is very eye catching. The very dark earth against the bright poppy colored rocks makes it so it really stands out from a distance. And to me, I really like that kind of thing, especially because that pop color for the base is the same as the pop color for my army. If you have different pop colors, you could always change that up and do the same in your own army. But I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, give it a like. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. We have new videos here every Saturday. If you've got any questions, pop those down in the comments below. Always answer every question asked. Don't forget, we do have a Patreon if you want to support the channel and take your next step on your hobby journey. That's really focused on review and feedback and lets you join an awesome community of very enthusiastic hobbyists. But as always, I thank you so much for watching this one. And we'll see you next time.