Make Your Own Base Texture

The Budget Basing Recipe

Today we’re making our own basing material. Here’s what you need:

• Spackle/Polyfiller (~$5, or cheaper in bigger tubs)
• Baking soda - Lifetime supply (~$7) - everyone should have this in their hobby kit
• Cheap paint - Apple Barrel works great
• Coffee grounds - Dried out, cooked in the oven to kill bacteria (technically free!)

For the price of one jar of name brand stuff, you can make a ton of this.

The Formula

2 parts material + 2 parts spackle + 1 part paint

Mix the different materials to get different size textures. Make sure to bust up the baking soda—it’s crazy how clumpy it gets.

The Oops

I wasn’t paying attention that my spackle was pink—“goes on pink, dries white.” Doesn’t really matter since we’re adding paint anyway!

Coffee Texture

Because there’s coffee in this, it’s going to turn itself brown anyway. The coffee I used was 7-8 years old and hasn’t molded.

Final Adjustments

Added 3 tablespoons of salt and 2 tablespoons of water after mixing. The salt stops any mold from growing and adds another texture type.

The Comparison

Compared to AK Interactive Ground Texture diorama stuff—it’s almost exactly the same! Little bit of difference in the cracking, but pretty spot-on.

Put the hobby back into tabletop gaming and make your own stuff!

Transcript

Today we’re going to make our own basing material. Uh this is like five bucks and they sell it in bigger tubs like big or like our plaster pairs. Like you can get it in this side for not much more. Uh I just went to the place right by my house and they didn’t have any big ones. So we could have saved even more money.

So this is five. This is like a lifetime supply of baking soda which is sodium bicarbonate which everybody should have in their hobby kit. This was like seven bucks. Uh, and then you don’t need you don’t need nice paints like that that white and this ink is expensive. Uh, you can use the apple barrel which is this stuff’s really cheap.

So, for like the price of this stuff, that’s one jar of what we were using. I mean, that’s a great product, too. But when you need it in bulk, this is a better way of doing it. Actually, what we’re going to use is this is old coffee grounds that uh you dry it out when you cook it in the oven for a little bit to kill all the bacteria and make sure that it’s actually dry so it doesn’t mold. So, this is technically free.

So, we’re also going to use some of this. All right. So, we’re going to eyeball this cuz I’m not very well prepared. And the way this works is we’re going to do equal parts of like the material to our this is spackle or polyfiller if you’re not in the United States. Two parts material, two parts spackle, one part paint.

And I like these jars cuz I can like see through them. I’m just going to I’m going to mix all this up. And this just makes sure we have different size textures. And you want to bust up that baking soda. It’s crazy how clumpy it is.

Oh, I was not paying attention that this stuff is pink. Uh I guess in retrospect it says goes on pink. Did not realize that. Goes on pink. It dries white.

Uh this will be interesting to see how it works for us. It doesn’t really matter just because we’re going to put paint in it, but I really have no idea what we’re going to get now. I need better. This was the only can of this they had, so I just grabbed it and walked out of the store. For this one, we’ll use I’m just using white.

Um, and I like a white cuz I can paint it. I was going to mix in some browns, too, on the other one. Uh, just because to save us some time, but see that this is pink. We’ll start with this. So now I’m just going to mix this up.

And I’ll be back after I mix it up. So you can see as we’re stirring this, it’s already starting to resemble our basing material. And because there’s coffee in this, it’s going to turn itself brown anyway. I didn’t think about that. And I just want to show you.

So we’ve mixed up two jars now. Um, mostly full, probably like 75% of the way. And I still like that was off a little cup and I still got a ton left in here and lifetime supply of baking soda and a little bit of paint. So this stuff is way cheaper and it’s going to give us the same results. Put the hobby back in to tabletop board gaming and make your own stuff.

It looks different. >> When I got back upstairs, I added 3 tablespoon of salt and 2 tbsp of water. And the reason I did that is just because I uh impromptu added that coffee. And that coffee at this point is like seven years old, eight years old and it hasn’t molded or anything. Uh but just as an abundance of caution and to add like another type of texture in, I added that salt cuz that’ll stop any mold from growing and just just be absolutely sure that no mold is going to grow.

And now here you can see this is compared to that AK interactive ground texture diarama texture. Uh it’s almost exactly the same. Uh there’s a little bit difference in that there’s cracks in the AK stuff, but it’s it’s pretty spot-on.