 Hello, everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video, and today we're going to talk about making an autumnal bass. We're going to make a bass for the month of autumn. So let's start out with everything you need. The month of autumn, the season of autumn. Hello. So, we're going to start with ab bass. This is a 32mm bass, but obviously this will work for any size. We're going to use a little bit of our good old friend cork, a little bit of cork, so that'll come up in a moment. I'm sure you've seen it before. We're going to use some Vallejo bassing paste, but you could just as easily make your own out of PVA glue and some grit. Speaking of grit, we're going to add some here and there. I've got a couple different sizes of grit we're going to use. No issue there. We're going to need some grass, so we've got a couple different kinds and sizes of grass here. We're going to use some tufts and flowers. Here are different tufts and flowers, all in the appropriate color schemes, yellow, white, orange, and then some nice, rich, deep green, which is what you want to see in those. You've still got green things. You want those to be in that kind of a rich color. Finally, of course, the key with everything autumn is that you want to have some leaves, and so here you can, of course, get your own leaves, but I like to use this little green stuff world leaf punch, and so we'll do that at the end to make some leaves. So, that's everything you need. Let's start making a base. So we start out, of course, as usual, we're going to add a little height and just dimension to the base in some places, just to make it interesting. So we just tear off a little bit of our cork here, try to make some interesting stuff where our fig could stand. Sure, that's fine, it's just something. I generally like to have a little bit of verticality to my base, and the reason we like to have a little bit of verticality is because it just keeps the whole world a little more interesting. You don't have to do it on every base, but what I find is that when every so often you have a base that changes in vertical height, what happens is your figures tend to just stand out better. Maybe you do it on the champions, that can be a fine play. Maybe you do it on, you know, two in every ten models. Okay, that's fine, too. It's not that you have to take every base and put some kind of cork on it just to raise them up, but even when you're doing something that's relatively flat like this, an autumnal forest floor, it can still be fun to just have a little bit of vertical height. If you've ever been hiking out in nature, you know that the ground is not level and flat because there are root structures and all sorts of other stuff under there that's going to get in the way. Once we have those glued down, see, simple, quick, easy, no issue, our next step is we're going to get out our paste and we're going to put that on there. So in this case, I'm using some gray sand, really doesn't matter. There's mud, there's desert sand, there's a hundred different versions of this stuff and you can really use any of them. It's just about having some kind of built in grit texture. This one's quite soft on its texture, but that's okay. So we're just going to go ahead and slap that on there, slap it on. Now what we want to try to do is make sure we disguise a little bit of the verticality change that's so harsh from our cork. What I mean by that is I'm paying special attention to leave a big, fat clump on these areas where it's changing between one level and another of the cork. By having that seam a more smooth incline, it feels much more natural. You can have a couple harder drops, it's all right, nature occasionally has some hard drops to it, it's not that weird. You just don't want it to all be like, nature doesn't have stair steps that it tends to form perfectly too often. Okay, we're also going to, I'm going to leave a little, you see here, I'm sorry, cleaning some space for my model's feet to eventually go. I want to make sure we actually have a place for the, you know, whatever is eventually on here to stand. That's not too crazy. Okay, cool. Grit applied. All right, see, first couple steps are easy. A few minutes in and already we're making headway. So with that, now comes the all important step of letting this dry, which takes quite a while. So I'm going to pause here and we'll be back in just a moment once this is all dry and then we'll do the rest of it. Okay, so we're going to do this part in voiceover. My paste that I used is all dry. Now it's time to add some more variance to that grit. All this is at one and a half speed, one and a half times speed by the way. So I'm placing down a little bit of that PVA water mix that I have. You're going to see me just kind of spread it out here with a, with a old garbage paint brush that I then rinse off. And what I'm going to do then is grab some rocks and some grit and put it over the top. Now the reason I'm doing that, even though most of this is going to end up covered by grass and other types of things like that later is because nature is very random. Little bits of this will peek through. This is also more important if you're going to lean more on mud and have less grass, you want this kind of variance because nature is not smooth. It's not a finished product. It happens, you know, randomly. And so you want to capture that. So once all that dried, I then just went ahead and gave it a good quick prime, a little zenithal prime. Now we've got some pale sand. We're going to take that and do a nice dry brushing. Now, the reason we're going to go ahead and dry brush there is because we do have all of this different grit and texture and stuff like that. And we want to pick that out. Now, I'm going to be a very aggressive this first time with my dry brushing, because this is more of an under shade. And I'm going to lay a lot of color over top of this. So I'm not holding back. I really went, you know, went full on, right? OK, now we're going to grab the sepia ink. I'm going to take that and mix it with a little bit of water. And you're going to see me just again, take an old brush and just kind of stipple it onto here. You'll notice I'm not dragging the paint brush in a in a like a sort of layer painting style. There's a reason for that. One, I want the application of the ink to be a little more random because that will produce natural, interesting color variation. Two, if you drag your brush around, you stand a much higher chance of pulling loose a piece of grit or rock or something like that that you applied before. But that sepia ink gives me such a nice, wonderful mud tone. Honestly, you could stop here if you wanted. But of course, you know me. Why would I ever stop here? We always got to go a couple more steps. So now we're going to grab some Rhinox hide, which is a nice purple brown from GW. And you're just going to see me stippling into like some of the darker parts, shadows, recessed areas, things like that. Think of this like contouring with makeup, right? This is just helping to create more of that interesting variance and actual scale that would be present if the thing were actually in reality where that where that little rock level would actually be two and a half feet high or something like that. Now we're going to grab my dry pigment palette. Highly recommend that if you get yourself some pigment, get a bunch out, put it on a pallet, just keep it near you. It's so much easier to to to use your pigment more often. I'm using a sort of brown, purple, red pigment here, which will be a nice color. Now, one of the interesting things about this is that when you use pigments, especially in the way that I'm about to use them, you can go way brighter than this. You could I could be using bright red stuff and crazy things because the dry brush and wash I'm about to do are going to desaturate a lot of those colors and bring them toward the middle. So once again, with the pale sand and once again, we're doing just a nice light dry brush this time on being much more light than the first time. I'm absolutely wanting to make sure that I get that texture picked out because there is still going to be a wash that goes over the top of this. But I'm trying not to be crazy. Then we grab our old friend Agrax. By the way, you can just as easily use there from sepia or Thony and camo shade or anything like that. Any any brands in strong tone, you know, any of those kinds of things that you want. And now we're just applying a nice healthy coat of that wash all over. Again, all we're trying to do here is just add lots and lots of variation, right, each one of these washes and dry brushes and things like that. Just creates more variation that accurately captures nature. So now we just let that dry. And it's all dry, the magic of film. So you can see we've got some good variation there and now it's time to do the grass. So you can lay down static grass with lots of different things. Most people use like a PVA and water glue or water mix like I did earlier. In this case, I'm going to use a little bit of super glue just for in the essence of speed. You can use either. And then I'm going to use the back of the paint brush to just kind of smooth it out because I want it to be a little thin layer of super glue. I don't want a big, thick dollop or something like that, right? Now I'm going to take some of static grass, you know, so I grab a big clump with a pair of tweezers and I'm just dabbing down with it, like in this this up down motion. The reason I'm going to do that is because that helps keep some of the grass standing upright because some of it will naturally be vertical as I dab down in it. And that will get stuck in the glue and nicely stay there. So with a couple of little grassy areas, now we're going to grab some nice dark green tufts. These will be a good counter to the lighter green static grass. Once again, just a little bit of super glue here and there. You can use the little small tufts. You'll notice that throughout this whole process, because this is this is the tufts and flowers section of the video. You'll notice I'm putting it over top of both fresh areas, like what's just mud and also sometimes I'm sticking it down on the grass. Right. And I'm going to do that with the flowers as well, because again, we want to simulate that natural layering that. Nature often has where there's grass and they'll be bushes on top of it and then some sticks in there and some flowers growing up through, you know, nature is very layered because it's all just growing over top of each other all the time. And so by creating your little layers in the same way here, you'll get something much more natural. The other thing I'm doing is you'll notice that I'm trying not to have any kind of recognizable pattern. What I mean by that is it's human brains love symmetry. They absolutely love to make sure that everything is in balance. So as I do the orange flowers here and then the yellow white flowers, it would be very easy to make a little triangle of orange flowers that are perfectly in balance and then a little triangle of yellow and white flowers that are perfectly in balance. But that wouldn't look very natural. That wouldn't really be nature. So instead, you've got to kind of get into that like Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance thing, where you've got to let your let your brain just go. You've got to get in the flow state now. But you've got to, you know, you either actively try to not have a pattern if you can't shut your brain off or shut your brain off and just kind of start sticking stuff around and don't think about it too much. Whichever way works better for you. So you'll also notice that I'm often taking the tips of my my tweezers and turning them around and stuff like that and pushing them down, especially down into where the sort of base of the the base of the tough is. And the reason for that is because you want to make sure that they toughs have this little like, you know, glue backer that they were built on. And you want to make sure that that's really, really down there and stuck to the texture of the of the base itself. That's how you help make it look natural. OK. So with all that stuck, now it's time to do some leaves. Wouldn't be fall without leaves, right? The trees change. And so how do we do leaves? Well, you got a little coffee filter here. I borrowed borrowed this one from my wife. And what I'm going to do is any coffee filter will work. You can use any kind of or tissue paper or anything like that. Doesn't really matter. But I laid it lay it down over a paper towel. And then I'm going to grab a bunch of different inks. So in this case, we're starting out with red earth to get some nice warm red leaves. And what you're going to do is just put drops of this all over the coffee filter or tissue paper or whatever you're using. You know, so I kind of let it run around there, spread it out, that kind of thing. Next up, we're going to use some orange. So this is some flame orange ink, another really nice fall color. You'll notice I'm not trying to keep all of these separate. In fact, exactly the opposite. I want areas of orange. I want areas of orange red. I want areas where they're mixing together. Now I'm going to grab some some agrax earthshade. Just kind of drippy, drippy, dropping that around. You can use contrast paints for this. You can use inks for this. You can use, you know, any kind of like thin liquid product for this. So just like I use the shades or the wash or the pure ink, they'll all work. And again, you'll notice I'm really trying to like get them all in each other's business while still having some areas of the pure color. So then I just kind of shake it, shake it all around. This is like a kindergarten art project. It's fun. This is super fun. Then I grab an old junk brush and I'm just going to start pushing colors together. See what happens. There's no rhyme or reason to it. I just move the brush wherever I feel like moving it. This is super relaxing. Like this is such a fun thing to do to make these leaves because you're just spinning colors around and you see what comes out at the end is this wonderful sort of fall mix of all of these different tones. It's important that it dries before we try to cut it. So I'm going to take my paper towel, fold it over, push down the excess to get to soak up all the excess liquid. Then off camera, I actually go get a hairdryer and make sure it's completely dry. So now it's time to make our leaves. Now that the coffee filters all dry, take the leaf punch, slide it all the way in. Nice, solid push down on the plunger. Now I just keep moving it around to different interesting sections and colors and just doing a bunch of punches, right? And you want that to be some of the leaf will be a little red and some will be a little yellow and some will be a little orange. And there you go. Look at all those wonderful leaves. Look at that wonderful mix of nice fall colors. Again, you can do any you could do any color you want with this. But the key is when they're all mixed up, when the colors are all bleeding into one another, you just get these wonderful shades that feel very natural. But then the question becomes, how do you get the leaves on to the base? And there's a couple of different methods. In this case, I'm going to use just tiny drops of super glue and attach each leaf individually. That is a fairly time consuming process. It is not necessary that you do it that way. There are many other ways. Another potential way you can do it is you can take a little water, a water PVA mixture like I had earlier, put that into a little pallet circle or something. And you can then kind of dip each you kind of dip each leaf in there and then you and then you just touch it down. And as the glue water mix dries, it will it will then stick in place. This is this is what we call professional work right here, by the way. Notice how I managed to stick the leaves to each other and then my finger and then the tweezers. Yeah, that's good work. One thing you want to make sure you do all the time with this is make more leaves than you actually need because you will waste some of them, just as a word of warning, no matter what you're doing. So but the point is whether you're using you can also, by the way, use a little like gloss varnish. You'll actually see me use some varnish in the next step. You can like dip the leaf into some gloss varnish or something and then set it on there. And when that dries, it'll actually hold it in place rather well. So whether a very careful application of super glue, this whole part of the video should just be called Vince. Troubles to use a basic set of tweezers, by the way. Whether it's a super glue mix, whether it's a little PVA water, you can also just kind of spread that over the base, like sop the base in it and then scatter the leaves on it and let them stick where they may. There's lots of different options. Find the one that works for you. There's no single right one. Here in a moment, I'm going to go back to doing it live and camera and you'll see how I basically at the end make sure that they're solid and attached and that they stick. That's obviously your chief concern. So there's a little bit of finishing we can do to make sure that these little tiny pieces of ink covered paper that we've put down actually do stay there as we, you know, because these could be gaming bases or something, so we don't want to be losing leaves at every time we play. So with that, you're going to see me put a few more leaves on, but I'm going to turn it back over to myself as we show you how to finish this out. All right, so there we go. Autumn base, more or less finished. Now there's some more things we can do from here, obviously, and we don't have to stop here. Obviously, you know, these little leaves may or may not be super well attached. It depends on I used super glue here just to kind of get them stuck quickly. You can also use a mix of PVA glue and water, which will tend to soak them in and make them a little more paper mache like and have them kind of stick a little better. So that's certainly a direction you can go. You can also, if you prefer, and one of the ways to kind of get them to stick a little more is you can also grab just some varnish of some kind, yet another use for varnish. All right, so we can take a little varnish in there. That wasn't mixed up. You can take a little varnish, use an old paintbrush, something that you don't care if you, you know, get messed up. You can take a little bit of that varnish and just kind of touch it down to the leaves and on them. That'll generally help them get a little protected and kind of stick here a little better. I'm kind of dragging the varnish over the leaves and onto the area underneath them. That'll just help them kind of stick. If you use something like an ultra matte varnish like I'm using here, you won't fundamentally change your sort of the color of anything because you don't want it to necessarily be bright and shiny leaves. That would be weird. Sometimes you'll have leaves fall off. Sometimes you'll need to restick them. It's OK. The varnish is usually good at holding them in place. Once you're all done with this, it's a good idea to just kind of blast the whole thing with some varnish to make sure that everything's nice and locked in and sealed in. OK, the other thing you can do. When you're working with all this, as I've told many times, one of the things you can also do is as your final step is get out your something like your Agrax Earthshade or a Thonian Camo Shade or something like that and kind of just get some of those washes around down in some of those tufts. It'll make them look a little more natural because right now everything is very bright and green and kind of monochromatic. So we can take a little bit of that and just kind of shove that down in some places. We can hit some of the leaves with it. That'll also help toughen them up. Also help them stick a little bit. The more like darker type varnish you use or sorry, darker type wash you use, the more it will make it seem like deep fall. And, you know, like color matters here. That is to say, if you use a lot of bright reds and yellows and oranges, it's going to make it feel like very early fall, like you're a leafer in, you know, New England. If you're using a lot of mostly browns and stuff like that, it's going to be late fall as it's starting to transition into winter, right? But you can push some of that stuff around. That'll help both lock the leaves in place because that will be another component that's just kind of there on top of them holding them in place. And it'll also make it feel a little more natural, like there's actual dirt and, you know, nature going on, which is important. The other thing you can do is take a little bit of your pale sand or something like that, some light color, some light warm, natural color. And you just get a kind of big brush, you know, something with some size to it. You go into a little bit of that, a little bit of that pale sand. We just wipe the brush tad and then we're going to come in and we're just going to kind of hit some of the tops of these tufts, hit some of the tops of these leaves. Just kind of create some more variation. Just little touches like that can go a long way to making it feel like there's actually sort of something going on. Like that is to say one of the problems with tufts is that they're often not really in scale. They're often way too green, way too whatever for their size. And by breaking them up by using a little wash and using a little quote unquote dry brush on them, you can you can end up with something really nice. So there we go. There's our autumn base. I'm going to obviously let that all dry. I'll throw a photo of it when it's all done. I'll, you know, black rim the edge and we'll be good to go. But so hope you like that. Obviously, you don't have to use all of these techniques. I threw everything at this 32 mil base. You can use any mix of it there. And whether it's a little bit of grass, the tufts, the foliage, the little flowers, the punched out leaves, you know, out of the coffee filter and like that, you can see how many I made always make more than you think you need because you will mess some up. They won't stick, things like that. But I hope that was helpful. If you liked it, give it a like, subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. If you've got questions, feel free to drop those down below. But as always, I very much appreciate you watching this one and we'll see you next time.