Forged Hope basing... with Modelmates!

With the holidays behind me ( or at least the family visiting ones ), I can get back to my contest entry for Forged Hope over at Massive Voodoo.

Original idea here was to go with something of a lazy fisherbot. Sitting on the side of a old river, and trying his luck at finding something for the village. Show his worth so to speak.

But as the base began to grow, so did the ideas associated to it, and so to the story!

Now I won't give away the full story right now.. but it is growing into one heck of a tale!

What I will show though today is how I have tackled the base, and how it has involved very few paints, and more products from Modelmates instead!

Since I received a nice package from Alan the owner a while back, I thought it would be good to do an unboxing, a review, and a step by step.. all rolled into one!!! BOOM! Efficiency times 1000 here!

Anyways.. yeah.. this base was a good test bed for all the mud, sand weathering liquids that Modelmates is famous for. And here is my hand at putting them to use.

So first up though, is the base. I scaled down my original idea to something a bit more manageable here. Instead of a monstrosity that would probably never see the light of day.

This socket I think I got from Hamburg when Steffan was there with his wares. But I cannot be 100% sure as my memory these days are foggier than London in Spring! And the piece was perfect for making it look like an abandoned or roughly opened riverbed due to how the wood piece was cut on the inside.

So the first things to do was to add some slate, some putty, some white stone paste, some textured paint, some grass pieces, a tyre, and a sign. Give it a bit of a story even before the model gets put onto the socket!

Above you can see my initial spray ( after priming in white ) of earth brown. A more reddish one, but still a decent little brown.

From here I added some darker colors to the mix.. to hit the shadows a bit..

Cream colors were added to lighten up the top sections of the base.

And a final blast of red/brown for the mud section.. which was not needed after I saw how the modelmates liquids worked on it!

At this point the socket was ready for no more paint, and just pure Pigment Liquids to be applied! I figured this would be a great piece to test out such products as I have a variety of sections that can use different ones in conjunction to each other. And give a nice homogeneous feel to the entire piece. Or at least that was the hope!

The main line up you can see above. The white label ones have a much thicker opacity than the ones on the left. Think of them as like base colors, with the others more like washes!

One thing I can note at the beginning is that you should use them in a well ventilated area. They do have a bit of a stink to them. Not as bad as the old GW washes mind you but a stink none the less.

Anyways.. first things first.. I tackled the mud section as that was the main section to the base. And if it worked, then the rest should be ( in theory ) fine!

Above you can see the before and after affects of the base mud color being laid down. Even just the first layer was beginning to give me the results that I wanted to see! Huzzah!

I would then play around in a wet on wet style for the middle sections of the base mud, and the darker wash of mud. To give it a slight wet look, and see what can be done with it.

Overall I was really liking the results here! And liking the direction it was taking already!! Best part being that no paint was used so far either! The variations to the mud color and depth was just based on how much or how thick I applied the liquid to start.

First hit of the base coat of sand really darkened up the top level. But it also began to make the entire feeling of the piece come together.. which was what I was hoping to have! So again.. win for me here!

It was at this point that I decided to paint up the socket in black to get an idea on how it would all fit together..

POW! BLAM! Already it is coming together really nicely!

Unfortunately I forgot to take photos after doing the socket and before applying other liquids to the base as I just began to get really carried away on it! Mixing the other 2 sand washes, along with the moss green wash into the piece to get some interesting variations to it.

The grass really reacted to the moss green wash in such a way that it bleached the ends of it white! And the mud effects really took to the plastic of the tyre to create the pulled out effect I was hoping for.

Really interesting to see how it was all coming together at this point and what the effects were beginning to look like!

At this point the only paint that has been applied was to the tyre and signpost to get them prepped for other aspects.. the rest is all Modelmate pigment liquid based! Pretty versatile stuff here.. and I have only to add some paint to it all to begin to really touch up the spot highlights.

Now to see how the rest of the piece will go.. and how other experiments with some still water effects and mud liquid go to make the mud really fresh looking!

Let me know what you think of it in the comments below!