 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about five simple things you can add to your bases that you probably have right now because they're free and that's great and you can make some really interesting bases. Now I started here of course by just laying down some cork just to build something up and give us an interesting service to work with and then I attached it with some super glue thin. You've seen me use cork in a million different videos no big deal. You've also got to lay down some ground texture so here I'm using some Vallejo gray sand paste just going to slather this all over it and this will help us with some later steps. Of course if you don't have this stuff you can just use your traditional mix of sand and grit and PVA and water and that's fine. Alright so the first thing we're going to start with is paintbrush toppers. If you're like me you buy paintbrushes and they come with these little plastic tips on top. Just throw those away. Those are super valuable. Even cheap brush packs you buy have them so here's a bunch of different sizes from different brushes I've bought over the year and I save these all the time. I have a little case with them all in there because these are perfect pipes. I use them all the time for little pipes and they're great if you're going to do water effects or if you just want random other bits. Now the reason I'm cutting another piece there is because that first one that I cut shot halfway across the room and I have no idea where it is to this day. But anyway you can see I just take the pipe slide it into the verticality that I've mixed there you know straight in just slide it on in. In this case I've let the Vallejo paste dry but not completely so that way it's still a little workable it'll hold my things in place. If you're not working with a paste like I am then you'll just want to let whatever you're doing dry and then you just you can lay down a little grate over top or drop some superglue thin on it to hold whatever you place in place. So with these two I bring down a little bit of the goop and now those pipes are in there. Bits. Alright that's obviously the next one. I mean this is the easiest one the one you probably already knew before you clicked on this video. But let's be honest we all have extra bits so here I just have a little collection of stuff I grabbed that I thought would be interesting. But what I want to encourage you to do is also think about little pieces of sprue so not just the bits that are left over on the sprue but the sprue itself. So I'm just taking a nice rectangular piece here chopping it in a weird angle so it looks a little rough on top and I'm just going to stick it in there as though it's a piece of metal protruding up from the ground and that's usually what I end up using these sprue pieces for. And you can carve into them with tools and make them look like wood and stuff like that but that's a little time consuming. Instead I'm just going to use it for a couple of different purposes so the one sticking up that's going to be metal. The one I'm pushing into the ground that's going to be a big rock. Easy. You can use it for both purposes. They'll look like nice sort of shale. So now I'm just trying to figure out where to put a little sword. This is like an extra back sword that comes off a storm cast. And I want to make sure that you know the feet of the person you still stand on here. I've done that beforehand so I knew what space I was working with. And then you'll notice how I push the tip of the sword down into the mud. That's really important. When you're placing bits on your base one of the things I see people do a lot is just kind of rest them there. And they look a lot cooler and more part of nature if you bury them in there. The other trick you can do is what I'm doing here. So I'm going to take this shield, cut a nice little quadrant out of it or something, you know, took a chunk out. And now I'm just going to go ahead and basically like Pac-Man, it's going to try to eat the base and put it in a nice little angle. So it looks like the shield was sort of buried into the earth. Now if you're using a basing PVA makes you may need to put a little extra on top to sell the illusion. All right, next up, paper clips. So paper clips are useful for a million reasons. If you look up in the top right, you'll see where I link a previous video where I've used them as rebar in buildings. We can also just use them as random bits of metal sticking out of the ground or to have to shape them like little weeds or little vines coming up out of the ground. They're really eminently useful. I've also used them as lightning before. So we start by just bending the paper clip so it's not a straight piece. You want, if you're using metal sticking up out of the ground as this will be, you want it to have a bend to it to look like it's been there for a while and some things come along and sort of rammed into it or, you know, whatever. It's in a living place. Notice I'm not using my nice clippers to cut paper clips. Always use like a heavy duty clippers for that because otherwise you just dull your normal clippers. Once I've got a nice bend there, I'm just going to find a spot and then shove it down in through the cork. The advantage again here of using that cork as a base comes up because it lets me place these pieces directly into it. Now I'll take a smaller piece and I'll have another thing coming out the side of the base, which is really just another way to make it look kind of cool and play with the three-dimensionality of the base, like as though this is a little tiny hill that used to be something and now stuff is sticking out of it, right? So just find a nice place. Just trying to see where do I want to place it, and then we just shove it right on in there and we're good to go. Alright, so this one's tea leaves. Dried tea leaves. You can open up packs of tea. I've used these before as ground cover in my jungle bases, but they're useful for more beyond that. If you break them up really small, they just become interesting large texture and in fact later on in this I'm going to paint a few of them as rocks or stones or shale, but what they do is they end up acting as really interesting larger texture. The nice part about these, they're already dried out. You don't have to bake them or anything. They've already been, they've already had all the liquid removed and they'll keep for years and years and years. I've had people ask me don't these rot? No. I've had this thing of tea leaves sitting in my drawer for seven years now and they still look exactly the same. I've used them on base for years and never ever had a problem. Drop them on there. Good to go. The last one's an interesting one. This one is broken technology. So broken technology is basically if you have an old mouse that breaks or a keyboard or you get extra cables or whatever. I save all this junk. I literally hit it with a hammer, break it open and then pull all the pieces and parts out. There's lots of fun stuff you can get in here. Cool little circuit boards for future stuff or that little piece on the end there looks kind of like a thruster or something buried. You can also just take old cables like this is a phone cable that came in something I bought recently which is comical and I'm just gonna, I just stripped it. I cut those little cables off and now they're the perfect scale little cables for you to run around the ground as though it's a piece of cable that was down in the ground and has now come up and out and it's sort of laying over like an exposed cable and there's lots of places you can you can put it you can bend it in a roughly hold its shape which is very advantageous so I'm just kind of trying to figure out exactly where I want it on this thing. But what it does is it lets me go ahead and place these around and again it's just more detritus right just more interesting stuff to have kind of poking out of the ground making it look busy and visually interesting and that's really the goal here right is can we keep the base get the base to be more than just dirt that's all we're going for there you go set them down and and they look nice and they're ready to go. Now we got to attach all this stuff in place I'm gonna use some more super glue thin you notice I'm just kind of putting a few drops here and there a little more than a few drops right there which is going to come back to bite me in about five seconds yep but so you glue all the things in place and you're all set basically everything will be held down once that glue set we can get to painting so next up we have our we've primed it I'm just gonna show it to you painted while we wrap up here you can see how once you prime it it really brings everything together now this base is a little bit of a cacophony of stuff I don't know that I'd really use all of this on one base right because I have a mix of fantasy parts and sci-fi parts and who knows what crazy world this base occupies you can see how that now looks like a nice rock the shield looks buried in the earth the sword looks discarded as though it's been driven down in there the cables the pipes everything all works and there we go that is a painted finished base and you can see once everything's brought together once everything's painted it looks really cool it looks distinct this is a busy world whatever figure this is they occupy somewhere not just flat mud or indistinct planet but a place that has stuff in it people lived here things happened and it tells a story all on its own a great base can elevate even an average paint job into an awesome figure and these kinds of little simple free things don't take that long to add but can pay huge dividends in the final product because they truly do make your unit your figure live in an interesting universe so there you go give that a like if you liked it subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future if you've got questions drop them down below if you've got more ideas for free stuff drop those down there too thank you for watching we'll see you next time you