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Still kinda fresh to the hobby so I'm wondering if you'd have some ideas for basing this. Also I was thinking about trying to dry brush some Ahriman blue back into the feathers as a highlight, would I be better trying to highlight them individually?
Any other tips and feedback welcome. Cheers

In general principle, when you have a dark mini you want lighter basing, and darker basing when you have a light mini. That way the mini doesn't blend into the basing. Given the fairly dark color of the hippogryph, I'd use a light, dusty brown and lighter green flocking or static grass. Or if you're doing paving, stick to lighter brown/greys.

My go-to process for basing is as follows.

1) Glue down any large terrain features such as rocks, logs, and other such things that would be imbedded in the ground first. Might be worth painting them now as well. Or you might find it easier to paint them later; you'll have to figure out which works better for you.

2) Use watered-down PVA to glue sand onto the base for texturing - just how fine a sand you use depends on the final texture you want. Alternately, various textured sculpting products can be used.

3) Saturate the sand with either watered down PVA or acrylic medium. I use a thinned-down black paint as both binder and primer. I've heard some people use Mod Podge instead, sometimes mixed with paint.

4) Next, saturate the sand with a watered-down brown paint to establish the base color of the dirt. Then drybrush with a lighter brown to highlight the texture.

5) Once you have your dirt looking the way you want it, it's time for static grass or flocking to taste.

6) Last but not least is to clean up the edge of the base so it looks neat. Black is the most common choice, but I've also used various shades of brown to blend in with the 'dirt'. Again, experiment and figure out what you prefer.

Drybrushing is realy messy, even with a small brush, it is basicly the step you have to do after basecoating but before highlighting,so you can easly paint over the parts you have drybrushed that should not have been.
So unless you can repaint it, you would have to manualy highlight the feathers.


As for basing, do it as Vulcan says, light base for dark models, dark base for light models.
there are so many, many ways to base that i cant help you there, but google can if you need inspiration.