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I can paint things fairly well. No painting comp winners, but good enough to get an at or above average painting score at tourneys.

The problem is that I can’t paint bases worth a feth.

I can do urban rubble just fine. But having every army based with the same thing gets boring.

I am looking for tips on painting earthy bases. I have the paints and I have some static grass.

Glue some sand to the base
Paint the sand brown
Drybrush lighter brown
Glue static grass to the base in patches

That's the method I use. Quite easy. And yet it produces acceptable bases. If you want a more lush appearance, you can glue some clump foliage to the base to represent bushes.

It's covered fairly well in HTPCM. Do you have it? I don't have it on me, but I recall thinking their instructions were fairly good.

http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/content/article.jsp?community=&catId=cat1290027&categoryId=600004&aId=6700006

Some ideas and pics here!!!

OT What happened to all of the articles on GWs website????

Some spots of glue on the base, let it dry rough. paint the rough areas to be different from the rest. Bingo. Colours I leave to you.

I'm not very creative when it comes to basing, I recently found this site that offers bases with terrain already in place all thats left to do is paint them. Proabably isn't very cost effective if you have a large army.

www.back2base-ix.com (not trying to advertise for them but I was really impressed with their products)

You could break out the hot glue gun to make lava fields or muddy ground - depending on how you paint it.

For my Wraithlord, I used an old CD that I cut into bits and glued onto a base to make lava floes, bits of stone floating in lava. Easy to build and only a moderate challenge to paint. Sorry about the size of the pics; I couldn't find the bit about how to make them small (if anyone points me in the right direction, I'd appreciate it!). Here's before painting:



and here's after painting:




I'm going to do the same for my unit of Banshees. I like to use a variety of basing options for my army, but will probably break down and rebase them when I find a theme that I like. So far, my favorite has been asphalt with road markings: PVA glue fine sand with the occassional small ballast, paint Codex Gray, wash Badab Black, then paint road markings. Very easy to do and looks great when you get it right.