Snow Bases for your wolf friends.

I recently purchased four; six by six sheets of cork for about seven dollars at my local Michael's. That's 144 square inches. I'll let one of you math whizzes figure out how many small medium and large bases that will cover but I'm going to go with the very precise measurement of "a lot". Cork is and easy to work with but in my opinion you can't just hack off a piece and slap it on the base. Sure it breaks easy by hand and leaves a cool edge, but that kind of effect simply isn't natural enough. Earth facing rock gets worn away by wind, rain, animals, and by water seeping in, being frozen, thereby expanding and cracking the rock. Hard edges are fine, but you should try to create some character. For me I grab a sculpting tool with a sharp point and start picking away at the cork. It pulls right apart and in about a minute I have a far more realistic chunk of rock than what I started with.

I then proceeded to adhere the piece of cork to the middle of a base and grabbed some small rocks from my bag of rocks. These were then placed around the cork to simulate, well, smaller pieces of rock. Other basing materials, such as sand, were then used to fill in the remainder of the base.

Looking at the base, I noticed that the top was too flat to actually look like rock. I know some of the base will have something standing on it; the rest, however, needs some more depth. I carved out a few channels with my sculpting tool. Then I grab an X-acto knife and cut down the middle of a chunk of cork in a diagonal direction. I could have ripped the cork instead of cutting it and I probably will try that next time around.

For a paint scheme I'm trying to get a look of medium colored stone. The nice thing with stone is there's usually not much you have to do in terms of highlighting. I paint my base a deep dark brown. Every nook and cranny gets a coating of it. Any recesses will collect dirt so you might as well start there to get the proper look.

After that coat, I do a light drybrushing of a dark grey up to a light one.

Stone of all types has ways of collecting and channeling water. If the water is still for very long it will stagnate and collect collect algae. It's a great look and super easy to achieve. I start off with a coat of VMC smoke thinned down just to the point of staining the stone. Any channels or rivulets get a dousing of this super thin mix. Then I add some Dark Angels green (though any dark green will do) to it, and thin it down some more. Coat the back and undersides of stones if you feel inclined to as well.

I keep my snow mixture real easy:
1 part water to 1 part white glue to 2 parts snow flock (or baking soda).
Mix it up and pile it on to the base. Once you have it where you want it, you can use a little water on an old brush and "melt" the snow where you want it. If you wanted to get even more fancy you could play with a thinned down gloss medium or varnish to make the snow look like it was melting. Paint it on the rocks for water runoff or over the top of the snow mixture.


gerrymander
\JER-i-man-der\ , verb;
1.
The dividing of a state, county, etc., into election districts so as to give one political party a majority in many districts while concentrating the voting strength of the other party into as few districts as possible.

cre·mas·ter
   /krɪˈmæstər/ Show Spelled[kri-mas-ter] Show IPA
–noun
1.
Entomology. a usually hooklike process on the posterior tip of a chrysalis, for attaching the pupa to a stem, twig, etc.
2.
Anatomy. the suspensory muscle of the testis.