How to Prepare Bases for an Entire Army Quickly and Cheaply

The Least Glamorous Work

Sometimes the most productive hobby days are the least glamorous. This is a couple hours in the afternoon worth of work—all the bases ready for the orcs and goblins.

The Technique

Using that basing material we made a couple days ago with my palette knife. Coming in, slopping it on.

Be firm but gentle. Don’t push it all the way to the base. That way you still get natural texture without obvious strokes of the knife in it.

The Speed Trick

I have a bucket of water that I’m putting my hand in to wipe off the old material. Then quickly clean off the side of the base.

If you take the time to use a paper towel for this, it’s going to take forever and waste paper towels. Just use your finger, wipe it off real fast, and you’re good to go.

The Results

I was able to do all of these in about two hours of work.

This brings our total up to about 250 bases. And we’ve only used half of this jar. Pretty sweet.

The Recipe

If you want to see how I made this stuff, here’s the quick version:

1. Old coffee grounds dried out
2. Cook it in the oven
3. Mix: 2 parts material, 2 parts spackle, 1 part paint

Thanks for watching. Tomorrow I start my goblin factory.

Transcript

Sometimes the most productive hobby days are the least glamorous. Uh this is a couple hours in the afternoon worth of work. I got all the bases ready uh for the orcs and goblins. And I just wanted to show you real quick how I do it so fast using that basing material we made a couple of days ago uh with my pallet knife. And I’m just coming in kind of slopping it on.

You want to be firm but gentle. You don’t want to push it all the way to the base. And that way you still get this natural texture without obvious strokes of the knife in it. And then I just have a bucket of water that I’m putting my hand in to wipe off the old like the old material. And then just very quickly and easily clean off the side of the base because if you take the time to use a paper towel to do this, it’s going to take you forever and waste some paper towels.

So just use your finger, wipe it off real fast, and you’re good to go. I was able to do these and these and these in about two hours worth of work. >> Now, this brings our total barrel >> amount of bases up to about 250 bases that we’ve done. And we’ve only used half of this jar. Uh, which is pretty sweet.

So, if you want to see how I made this stuff, if you didn’t catch my other video, I cut it down to be about 30 seconds long to show you how to make it. Uh, thanks for watching and I’ll catch you guys tomorrow when I start my goblin factory. This is old coffee grounds dried out and then you cook it in the oven. Two parts material, two parts spackle, one part paint.