I finally bought two GSW texture rollers (grill and factory) and some Sculpey. I haven’t had a need for homemade bases before now but I’m pretty glad I had the opportunity. The effort is low to roll out some fine looking bases for my SF minis, and a little paint gets me very different feels. I went for brass and steel, shiny and stained, for variety in my SF unit “teams,” and it all went well. There’s a few lines where I rolled the Sculpey too thick and the back of the pattern impressed it. I assume they machine the patterns out and don’t polish the flat surfaces- fine by me, but I do need to make sure I’ve got the clay flat, and I was working on probably too much at once for my first try.
I got a little aggressive with the metallic drybrush and didn’t black out all the grill-holes when I was done, but for the first time I’m also painting batch lots and couldn’t be arsed. They still look pretty good to me. I’m sure I’ll regret steps I left out some day in the future, but right now I’m delighted that I learned and got to play with new toys.
There’s a hundred different rust recipes out there and I’ve used a few. This one was two layers; a dark orange brown and then a bright orange in the middle. It reads well and is just dandy for tabletop bases where the focus should be on the mini, but for more important parts of a mini I might want to be adding some reds and a few more layers. Overall grime was added with homemade washes using a 50-50 mix of water and matte medium, plus 1 drop of wetting agent/flow aid per 1/4 cup of mix, and as much ink as I needed to get the pigment I wanted. Usually 5 or 10 drops in a 10ml bottle. I went with black and brown wash for these.
I’m probably buying another half-dozen GSW rollers next month, once I’m done my SF kick and want to start in on fantasy work again. I’ve done four or five little terrain bits of “brick and stone” in the last year or two and it is a massive pain to do it with individual stones, even as a learning project or experiment. I’ll keep doing it for things that have to be viewed from all sides, like a village well, but I’ve got a kind-of-modular temple thing I want to do for TTRPG and wargaming terrain, and I’ll be damned if I don’t have a GSW roller for the walls of it.
