I started writing this as a zombie basing tutorial with a bit of preamble. The pre, however, has become a full blown amble, so I’m splitting it into two posts. This one covers the long and tortuous journey, while the second post will cover the actual construction of the base.
My Zombie Horde
I have a number of types of zombie in my horde. The largest group is based on the Zombies!!! Bag’O Zombies figures, which definitely fall into the “cheap and cheerful” category. There are four figures available: man, woman, dog and clown.
There are two problems with these figures: the first is that each type is only in a single pose, but the second, and main problem, is that they’re only a little over 26mm high from ground to top of the head, which means they look tiny when placed next to the current figures on the market. They come with a moulded on base that adds a couple of millimetres, but they still look too small.
Below is a picture of them next to some StudioMiniatures zombies, showing the size difference.
I reckoned that, if they could be brought up to the same height as current figures, they'd be okay. This is a photo of some of the completed ones (using clay), next to the same StudioMiniatures figures. They're not brilliant, but they are acceptable.
With that aim in mind, I set about trying to increase the height of their bases. I tried a number of approaches:
Clay
I glued the zombie to a plastic slottabase (one without a slot) and applied some air drying clay. This worked okay and brought the zombie up to a reasonable height, but didn’t give a particularly pavement-like appearance to the base.
Filler
The clay was okay, but it wasn't particularly easy to apply, and the package dried out before I was ready for the next group (despite sealing it). My next approach, suggested by a forum post, was to use Tetrion wall filler.
I glued the zombie to a 25mm diameter MDF base and built up around the zombie’s base with the filler. It was quicker than the clay, but again, the end result didn’t look particularly good - pretty much the same as the clay base approach.
Casting my own base
One of the things that I wanted was for the zombie to look like it was walking on a pavement, something I hadn’t managed to achieve with the previous two approaches. I decided to create a base with a hole left for the zombie’s base, cast it up and use that. My thinking was that the top of the base would be textured plasticard, so it would provide the desired pavement look.
I spent/wasted a few days cutting and filing a base master. It was built up from several layers of plasticard as my compass cutter wouldn’t handle the thicker plasticard (I don’t think I have anything that cleanly cuts 2 mm thick card).
Base master, and with zombie dropped in
Anyway, I finally finished the master, at which point I realised that there were a number of problems:
- as the master was built from several layers of plasticard, it wasn’t particularly smooth. RTV silicone rubber has a nasty habit of reproducing everything it touches, so I was going to be left with very untidy bases that would require further finishing
- I only had one master, so I’d have to either cast the bases one at a time or cast a few and make a new master with eight or ten bases on it. This was starting to look very time consuming, as well as being massive overkill given the quality of the figures I was basing
- materials for casting the bases. I’ve never had much luck with resin, so it looked like the bases would either be plaster or Alumilite (yes, I know it’s a resin, but hopefully even I couldn’t mess up something that only takes three minutes to set). Plaster would get chipped the first time it was used, and the only Alumilite I have is several years old, although still unopened
- cost. Both RTV rubber and Alumilite are expensive and I suspect each base would have cost a lot more than the figure standing on it
This was starting to get silly, so I decided to try and simplify the basing process. I wondered about doing away with the slottabase and instead sitting the zombie in the centre of a plastic tube, which I would then fill up to the base level with something. For the plastic tubing, I turned to...
Denture Tablet Tube
I had a look for 25mm diameter plastic tubing in my local model shop, but couldn't find anything. After a think about where I could get some, I picked up a tube of the cheapest own brand denture tablets I could find. It didn't seem appropriate to measure the diameter of the tube in the shop, but on getting it home, it turned out to be exactly 25mm.
Out came my trusty razor saw to try and cut it. While still more than capable of cutting metal, it bounced off the plastic, not even making a dent. One shiny new razor saw later and I'd hit my next problem - I can't cut straight to save myself.
The mitre boxes I had weren't deep enough for the tubing and the new one I bought was too wide to securely hold the tube while I cut it. Add to all this the fact that cutting it produced a very untidy edge that was going to require a lot of cleaning up and I realised that this wasn't going to be the solution to my problem either.
Drilling out a blank to make a master
I accepted that I wasn't going to mass produce plastic rings from denture tubes any time soon, but reasoned that I could probably manage one. My plan was to create a blank base - effectively a mini pedestal - and then make a hole (or leave a hole when constructing the master) for the zombie base to drop in. It would then just be a simple matter to tidy up the gap between the zombie base and the rest of the pedestal. This, of course, still left the problem of mass production, not to mention the act of creating the master.
Fortunately, the denture tube and pedestal drilling base ideas were restricted to my fevered imagination, so I didn't actually waste any time trying to create anything.
Progress
I can’t remember what started my thoughts in this direction (possibly desperation on the part of my right brain), but I started to think about removing the built in zombie base. Most of my problems I had encountered were to do with getting the rest of the ground up to the height of the integral base, so removing that base would remove that problem - level the playing field, so to speak. With that thought fresh in my mind, I clipped a zombie from its base and glued it directly to textured plasticard.
This immediately gave me the flat pavement surface I wanted. However, it also made the zombie 26mm high again. My first thought on this was to glue the zombie base back underneath the new base, mount everything on a MDF base and then apply filler to conceal the gap.
This all seemed to be getting silly again, so I had a think and came up with the idea of building the pedestal part of the base from 2p pieces, topped off with the textured plasticard. The coins are the same diameter as the plasticard and stack and glue without any problems.
I built ten of these bases, attached the figures and took the whole lot into the loft for undercoating.
It was at this point that I realised that the bases were very heavy. Three 2p pieces may not seem much, but compared to a plastic figure, they’re a lot. They were so heavy that I was concerned that they would pull free of a figure when it was being used in a game. This concern was realised when I was undercoating them, as one of the zombies detached itself from its base while I was lifting it to be sprayed.
On bringing them back down from the loft, I accepted that the coins were going to be too heavy, so removed the zombies from the plasticard (I couldn't recover the plasticard toppers, they just tore when I tried to remove them) and binned the coins (I really couldn't see my local shops accepting three 2p coins superglued together, with their edges covered in black paint)
On looking around for something lighter for the pedestal, I struck upon the MDF bases I'd used earlier. Two of these are the same height as three coins, and weigh virtually nothing. These bases are sold as laser-cut 25mm bases, but, ironically, they're slightly less than 25mm diameter (they just don't make lasers like they used to). This means that the plasticard is slightly too large, but it's not much, and looks acceptable.
I glued two bases together (using superglue rather than wood glue for some reason) and attached a plasticard topper. The final painted result is shown below
and a comparison shot of a StudioMiniature zombie, a pedestal zombie and an "out the bag" zombie
This is going to be my base construction method for the rest of these figures. The bases are light and quick to make (as I'll be describing next post) and bring the figure up to an acceptable height on the gaming table. I used them in the battle report last week and they survived the trip and the game without any damage.
Conclusion
For anyone who's managed to read this far :-), there are a number of lessons I've learned from all this:
- don't get fixated on an approach. I spent all my time trying to build the ground up to the attached base and it never occurred to me to simply remove the base
- it's a lot cheaper in your head. In the end I managed to avoid buying too much stuff, but some of my approaches would have been expensive failures: RTV rubber, resin etc. - not to mention that I actually looked up the cost of a power mitre saw. There is one, done by Minicraft/Proxxon, but it's very expensive.
- keep notes. I kept an Evernote document with the various ideas written down. It's quite interesting (to me anyway) to see what I tried, and things I discarded without even attempting. If nothing else, it can be used to write a really long-winded blog post one day.
Next time I will cover the actual making of the bases. It will be a lot shorter, but will have more pictures.
No comments:
Post a Comment