 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby-cheating video. Recently GW sent me this guy right here and it became the question, what do I want to do with him? I knew I wanted to paint him but what tutorial could we do? I've already done Inner Flame, you can find the link for that one right up above. I've done Painting Fire and let's face it, once you get past Inner Flame and Fire, that's most of this model. Then it occurred to me, Scorched Earth Basing. It's a really cool idea of a creature so hot that as it walks around it burns the Earth, scorches it and unleashes lava trapped beneath the surface. So that's what we're going to do today. We're going to make a super cool Scorched Earth Base for our Avatar of Cain. Let's get into it. The strict technomancer that is Vinci V. Let us get into the technique and learn it Vinci V style. Alright, we're going to begin with this footage moving pretty fast but that's because we're just doing building. We're going to start with our old friend Cork. Quick note, a few times you'll see me compare a blue posty note with two little black marks on it. Those are the feet, the inner feet of the Avatar of Cain. That way I make sure I'm building this to the right size. With Cork, the key with Cork is that it's never your base alone. You can use it to build mass but you shouldn't leave very much of it exposed because the more of it that's exposed, the more it will obviously just look like Cork. It doesn't look realistic, it looks quite fake, it looks like Cork, it looks bad. I lay it all in place then we take some extra thin superglue. By the way, if you don't have any extra thin superglue, which you can see runs like water, it's a great tool for your arsenal, especially for basing. It is completely worthless for putting together models. Please don't ever try to assemble your model with superglue. It also heats up instantly and has a lot of fumes so please use it in a well ventilated area. Now I'm going to actually draw out the feet basically for where they're roughly going to go and then I want to draw a lava crack running from his feet so it's obvious what's happening. That right foot has a big piece of fire shooting off of it so I want to make that all connected. Sell the effect. Where he steps, there's a big piece of fire ripping up from the ground and then also we're going to have the ground cracking open and lava spurting up and running out. Next up is our Liquitex Gloss Gel Medium. This is great stuff. You can buy this in big giant tubs, relatively cheap for any kind of lava or water effects. This stuff can be an absolute lifesaver. It's so perfect. It dries with this smooth, wonderful texture that looks like a flowing liquid and so I'm just using it to fill all the space where I'm going to end up having lava on the base. Basically I'm going to have it cracking out of the front of one foot and then a little bit coming out of the front and back of the other foot but I don't want to overwhelm the whole base. One of the keys with selling this scorched earth effect as you'll see is that you have to still have normal earth. What I mean by that is it can't all just be lava, otherwise we're just doing lava bases and I already have a tutorial on that. With this you have to have the normal ground in there too that's been recently turned. The scorch is only visible when contrasted against the still normal earth. I'm just laying down a bunch of different sand and grit and rocks of different sizes, spreading it around. There's no glue there. Then once again our old friend Super Glue Thin is going to come to the rescue. We're just going to spread some drops around. Not all of this will stick and that's okay. You can see as I just sort of lock everything in place I'm just dripping it around like water. It runs very smoothly and just soaks into everything. It will flatten some of this texture out but don't worry. We're going to build it up plenty from here. I end up doing this like a little more putting a little more sand on the top after this one base just to really build it up and really hide that cork. Let's continue the cork hiding and now it's time to get into all the greens and I hear what you're saying. Oh my God Vince, you madman, what are you doing with tufts and grass? That base isn't painted. Well, let me let you know a secret. We're going to paint the grass. That's right. It's time to get super radical. I'm starting with this extremely fine grass texture. This is like the hyper fine grass green texture usually for scale modeling train type stuff and when it soaks into the Super Glue by the way it will turn brown. So don't if you're going to use this and intend it to be the finishing color please don't put it on a Super Glue it will turn into brown dead stuff which I guess could look cool if you were just trying to get brown dead sort of grass texture but I wasn't here. I'm just going for microtexture. This is laying down the bottom bed of grass. One of the ways I usually see people mess up grass is they just stick on a couple tufts or just stick on a couple areas of grass and that's not realistic. Grass is going to build up it has lots of fine different textures because it's not just grass there's also other tiny plants and plant life and organic structure in there. Moving up into the larger green grass texture here like the actual field grass grass the nuclear green grass that does not look realistic at all. You'll notice that I dropped down Super Glue and then I dab at it with a big old clump in my tweezers by doing that I get it to stand straight up so you get the same effect as if you had one of those little magic static grass applicators but you don't need to buy one of those applicators you can just dab and you'll get the same sort of effect especially if you then tip upside down to pull it back out and so repeated locks here of everything in some Super Glue thin to lock it all in place and then of course dab, dab, dab, dab, dab we get rid of all that other grass that wasn't attached anywhere. Now finally is where we can go to the tufts after I've laid down the microtexture of the tiny grass texture the field grass of the static grass and then and all the sand and dirt now I'm going to go to the tufts and I'm going to use those to fill in specific areas and to build up extremely larger sections of grass texture that I want to really be pronounced. So the key with building a realistic earth base is that you build it like you would the earth and the same strata and layers the dirt, the micro organic texture the small grass and then the bigger plants if you build up like that you'll get something more natural now as well there are lots as I said there tends to be lots of other organic material in grass so here I'm using old tea this is dried out tea that's just been crushed up I'm just putting down some Super Glue and then further crushing it in my fingers and putting it in there this wonderful in scale look of sticks and bark and just other random junk that's on the ground and so just a couple little drops of that little patches of that to show other stuff that's mixed into the grass that again makes it feel natural it's not all just grass there's other things that have come from trees and other fauna that's around and again just a few drops of Super Glue then to seal it all in the final step here is to then bridge the gap between the smooth flowing lava and the actual rest of the ground that's still normal and earth we're going to turn to our old friend Martian Iron Earth from Games Workshop wonderful product I really like the key with using it is you put it on thick it's got to go thick but that's actually great you can control this thin layers of this Martian Iron Earth will barely crack it'll just get little micro cracks big super thick chunky piles when it dries out we'll get big giant cracks so you can actually put a big portion of it in the center and then smooth it out toward the edge to get the effect of larger cracks going into smaller ones alright so you saw how we built the base itself but of course just building it well that's only half the journey with that part done it's time to get into painting and painting bases like this can be really fun because you don't need to be precise you don't need to be careful you just get a big ol' brush you grab a lot of different colors and you go nuts so let's have some messy fun let's paint this base so I'm going to use a lot of the same colors I used on the miniature itself and of course with the integrations of some other tones as needed I zenithled this base but you'll notice in the areas where I was going to put down lava I sprayed a pretty healthy amount of ivory to sort of whiten that out I start by just laying down a dark brown over some of the stuff that I think I want to be dirt but just to kind of outline what I'm doing now it's time to turn all the grass green now I'm not going to actually keep all of the tufts green because I started with that dark brown which I actually made just by mixing red and green together and then I kind of coated everything I can dry brush the grass effectively and the top thin areas will look like brighter grass we're going to color the grass more much like we did with the earth itself how we built it up we're going to paint all the grass green then we're going to scorch it because all those layers on top of each other because they're built up naturally that means the grass would be green before it got burnt will help make it more realistic moving on now to add some lighter color to the green this is just integrating some of the yellow into the green to catch the very high areas effectively just dry brushing it with basically a bright version of a yellow very very bright I'm going to now just cover over all of that ivory making sure to get that in the areas that are going to be chiefly lava this won't be the final color but it'll get me going now comes a secret look at all those wonderful cracks we got out of our Martian iron earth but the trick is we need the lava underneath how do we do that? well we take white ink and we mix in one to one with flow improver and then with our moist wet brush we then touch the areas that we want it to run into and you can see with all of that flow improver in there look at how it's just going to spread out into all the little cracks you will need to apply this potentially multiple times now with golden brown we're going to start making things look dry if there's fire in the area, the sticks, the things like that they would be dry and sort of cracked because of the heat so on all of our ground items that we made out of tea leaves plus the very tip tops of some of the grass we're going to take this golden brown color over just to show that everything's been dried out been completely devoid of moisture just from the heat that's in the area but again this process is about repeatedly building this up now using some red ink and some fluorescent orange and one to one with flow improver we're going to do the same trick again over the white now why did I lay down the white first because the orange alone doesn't have any covering power and so if I just dropped it into those open cracks over the black it wouldn't show up and it would look terrible by dropping it in over the white that is sunken down in between everything it very easily tints that white fluorescent orange and now it's going to look like we have lava cracks hidden underneath the earth as we repaint it I just want to jump in here and say this base is going to look really ugly in the middle of it don't worry about that these kinds of bases have a very significant ugly face because we're using all these different colors together at once and before you really get everything filled in when you're still messing with the base being partially in green and white and partially colored and before you get the burn effect on it's not really going to sell but trust me, stay with me we're going to get somewhere real cool real soon the magic of selling these scorched earth is in having these areas that appear so hot and so fiery and then contrasting that through a transition of slowly cooling heat out back to the normal earth so here with the white yellow I just hit the very centers of that lava line to make sure that those central areas of heat are super duper duper hot and this is an area where less is more you always want to make the really really really hot areas extremely small that small area of contrast will actually make it pop more and feel much hotter people often go wrong on lava bases by making too much yellow too much white, too much heat most of it needs to be orange, orange red and black now what I'm doing here is just slowly covering over all of those cracks that we got from the Martian iron earth with slowly progressing down from an orange red to a whole red to black again, none of the exact paints I'm using here matter you can see the tones, it's just a dark brown red you could make it out of any color you wanted but I'm basically doing almost a dry brush with my brush like a lot of stippling type movements I don't want to get any paint in those little cracks that we dropped our orange into and then I slowly move out to pure black in these areas and that contrast of the black within the orange cracks in between that's what sells the heat effect the other thing I'm going to make sure I do is make sure that the entire ring of heat everywhere around it on the earth has this black paint so not just the little earth cracks that we made with the paint but also all the remnants of my cork and stuff like that the edges of all this heat need to be this black black red color because that's where the heat has burnt itself out and effectively scorched the earth that's the real take home key now we're going to carry it farther using a little bit of black red we're going to go ahead and just stipple dab a line into the grass nearest the heat so I'm not intending to turn all of the grass black I don't want to scorch everything again we need to balance the scorch and the heat against the normal still existing earth so there has to be some green grass left for us to understand what's happened and I'm just shoving that paint in there real bad notice I've used a fat awful brush for all of this but again making a ring around all of the areas of heat dabbing that grass completely black so it looks scorched out and then lightly dry brushing over some of that bringing that scorch down but of course scorched grass doesn't just turn black it ashes, it carbonizes so here using a gray we dry brush over just a few of the center areas that are the most burnt as well as the edges of the grass really making it look like it's burnt think of like cigarette ash that's almost what you want here right by hitting those scorches on the edge it's all black with a heavy heavy dark heavy stipple we then and then turning it gray it really looks like we've ashed it out now I'm just smoothing out some of my blends taking in some more mid-yellow orange tone to just kind of bring back some of the heat smooth out some of the white and so on and so forth now comes the real magic we take our fluorescent orange and we just dab it around not everywhere we're not covering everything we did with the gray the same area where we dry brush the gray onto the grass we touch that fluorescent orange in just some places that's the cinders the hot cinders that are still burning that are still fiery and this is the magic with just a few stipples of these hot cinders floating around it really sells the effect of the heat moving through the air of little particles of earth and grass floating along being super hot burning and still on fire that's how we sell it so there you go that's the base all finished and here it is with the guy mounted on top I'll run some pictures over the top I'll take some pictures of the base specifically so you can see exactly what's going on all in all this was really fun to sort of make this base to show normal earth and then to scorch it obviously I went pretty far having active lava running out and you really wouldn't see grass this close to lava normally but it's a fantasy world so we can use our imaginations I hope this was helpful and gave you some cool tips on ways that you can integrate this kind of stuff into your own basing schemes give it a like if you liked it subscribe for more hobby cheating in the future we have new videos here every Saturday if you've got questions drop those down below I always answer every question that's asked but as always I thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time bye