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I want light grey / white texture on my base, and I see that there is some model train fine ballast out there with these colors. I put glue on my base, put the ballast on, let dry, maybe do some kind of wash to darken recesses, then seal with a glue / water mix. Done?

The point is letting the color of the ballast show through. And also saving time and effort. Anyone do this?

I just use beach sand. Same idea, different colour results.

I don't do it particularly to save time, because I do a lot of other pfaffing around that costs time. If I just wanted to save time on painting bases I would just spray paint them en masse.

Honestly, grit basing takes next to no time at all, depending how you go about it. For my orks, I use sand, glued down before priming. Since I prime black, the base color for the ashen wasteland is already taken care of. Once the model is painted, I drybrush with two shades of gray. Takes all of 30 seconds per base.

Do you prime white, by any chance? If so, you could base before priming, then give it a quick wash and drybrush at the end.

The thing is, unpainted materials usually look slightly "off" or "out of scale" when put next to painted miniatures. I'd recommend painting the basing material. You really don't have to spend much time on it, at all, and the results will mesh better, I think.

My Ork army uses unpainted basing grit from Galeforce 9:
- there's a bit of color variation by adding in the larger grit. Every army since this one has had painted sand, but these guys were in a desert scheme anyway so it all worked out.

Stavkat wrote:I want light grey / white texture on my base, and I see that there is some model train fine ballast out there with these colors. I put glue on my base, put the ballast on, let dry, maybe do some kind of wash to darken recesses, then seal with a glue / water mix. Done?

The point is letting the color of the ballast show through. And also saving time and effort. Anyone do this?

i've done that for my first army, roughly 5,000pts of blood angels in 3rd edition. for a while, i didn't have any basing on them because i thought it looked cool but eventually decided to complete the model. even a simple and quick technique like you're describing looks immeasurably better than a naked base. i used light grey medium ballast with a black wash i made myself (just some flat black paint and lots of water).

warboss wrote:ii used light grey medium ballast with a black wash i made myself (just some flat black paint and lots of water).

LOL, great minds think alike? I just came back from the hobby store where I purchased a light gray / gray medium ballast blend.

Yup, simple ballast is great. For a lot of my models, I just use a single paint colour, PVA and ballast.

Considering it's so cheap, I've had good results from getting both Coarse and Fine Ballast and mixing them - more Fine than Coarse. Then glue onto the base. I find it helps if you paint the bases a shade darker than the ballast. My examples...

Stavkat wrote:I want light grey / white texture on my base, and I see that there is some model train fine ballast out there with these colors. I put glue on my base, put the ballast on, let dry, maybe do some kind of wash to darken recesses, then seal with a glue / water mix. Done?

The point is letting the color of the ballast show through. And also saving time and effort. Anyone do this?

Just got back to work on my orks after a few years and had some galeforce 9 stuff lying about. Painted the base top snakebite leather, glue down a mix of fine medium and large grit and gave that a devlan mud wash to give it a oil/chemical polluted soil look. Quick, easy, lazy, its all of these things and looks good. So buy the gray stuff or paint it gray it should be quick and look good either way.

Just a quick update here. I used medium grey blend ballast and it looked alright. I gave it a black wash and then a white drybrush and it actually looked great. A little more work than what I wanted to do, but not by too much.... of course I was testing it on terminators, it might be more annoying to drybrush through a marine's legs on the smaller bases....

What I do for an easy basing is adhering a layer of cork, then glue the model to it, add some PVA and throw in some thick salt grains.

Once dry add some cyanoacrylate on the salt, just in case and paint normally. After you finish the model, depending on what colour you primed it, add a wash, and then drybrush the color you like the most and voilá.