We’re here today to talk about industrial-themed bases — as in the things your little space men and women and critters stand on, not full-on terrain features — across the full spectrum of sci-fi wargaming products, from Games Workshop’s 40K and Necromunda lines to even a little bit of Infinity. The concepts here should work for whatever game you’re getting up to on the tabletop, as long as it involves your models being in an industrial zone.
Mike BS
When thinking about a basing scheme for my Blood Angels, I wanted something a little more exciting than my usual basing paste, or gravel mix. To help “sell” the overall composition I also wanted everything on the base to be painted, unpainted stones and tufts can sometimes be jarring when based with miniatures. I’ll often back crowdfunding projects without having a clear idea of what I might use the subsequent models for, and that’s how I came to back Txarli Factory and Goonmaster Games. There was plenty of inspiration to be had and I eventually settled on the idea of the Blood Angels defending a Forge planet. A desperate fight in the sweltering confines of factories, choked artificial light bouncing off metal halls providing a backdrop.
My basic scheme is fairly straightforward, and you’ll like see a pattern emerge through the article:
- Prime black, airbrush or rattle can. I’ll be referencing an airbrush from here on out but there’s no reason you can’t use a rattle can or brush.
- Working up from the black, the entire base gets a coat of Vallejo Metal Color Exhaust Manifold. This gives a nice dark base for the next step.
- Dry brush Vallejo Metal Color Duraluminum, Leaderbelcher, or another mid brightness silver to catch most of the detail.
- Dry brush MiG Ammo Drybrush Silver, Necron Compound, or another silver to catch the edges and raised details.
It can be very easy for metallic bases to end up looking quite uniform, so to differentiate the types of metal I used a few different washes and contrast paints to create some variation. For the flat metal areas I went with Ratling Grime, the perforated metal was given a couple of washes of Drakenhof Nightshade, and pipes and cables were picked out with Snakebite Leather. The cable sheaths and black sections of hazard stripe were painted with Vallejo German Grey. To get the yellow hazard stripes bright enough I started with a base coat of white, and then went back over them with a bright primary yellow.
To bring everything together, I used a small piece of sponge to stipple Vallejo Hull Red and Flat Earth in various spots to represent built up rust and grime, followed by stippling with silver. If you’re feeling fancy, you can add some extra character with products like Dirty Down Rust or MiG Ammo U-Rust.
All of this is great for models bound by gravity, striding across the battlefield, but what about those models on hero rocks, leaping from ruined rock to conveniently placed ruin? I hit a lengthy mental block trying to kitbash and base my way out of this, eventually finding what I needed in the Goonmaster Games collection.
It made sense for the battlefield to be littered with pieces of reinforced concrete, I-beams, and other large pieces of debris. Tying these back to the base was still a little challenging, and while I think my current approach could use some refinement it worked well enough.
Once I’d found something that roughly matched the size and shape of the ruin or rock I was replacing, I carved away the original and secured the model to its new perch. Using super glue and green stuff, I mounted it to the base, then covered the join with pieces of cork, and more basing bits.
DYLON’s Necromunda Underhive Bases
To learn how to build these bad boys, check out our article here.
As for painting, I use a totally different method to paint my bases versus how I paint my terrain, so the goal is always to get them close to matching. I base coat the entire base top with Doombull Brown. The floor tile gets a few layers of Yriel yellow until it’s mostly even. (Depends on how patient I’m being). To rust and weather the base, I use a method where I flood the entire base top with Contrast Medium and then work in varying quantities of Mournfang Brown, Vermin Brown and Firey Orange.
Genghis Cohen
I have two methods of painting, one for Infinity and one for Necromunda. I do generally use sculpted bases for both systems. GW make cool plastic bases specifically for Necromunda, and have some other lines suitable for 40k-setting industrial flooring. For Infinity, most of my collection uses bases from a now-defunct company called Antenociti’s Workshop, but I have used Dragonforge Designs, MicroArt Studios, and more recently 3d-printed bases from ProxyWars. If you’re in the USA, I believe Warsenal also makes a range of toppers for the new-model Infinity plastic bases, which many players like because they come with 180-degree Line of Fire marked out – I have been collecting since long before that development. These days, any number of futuristic sci-fi metal flooring bases are only a quick search away.
But, I do think these painting methods work well for scratch-built bases as well. Making a vaguely industrial-themed base is easy as pie. Try to use a flat-surface base, not one with any pebbling texture built in. Take some card, cut into a strip across the base, or just some rectangles of differing dimensions. Glue them down. Boom, your base can now be painted as metal sheeting. Fancy stuff like adding rivets or wires is completely optional, a little detail goes a long way here.
Genghis’ Necromunda Bases
This method is intended to look like dark, grimy metal with some rust on it. Optionally, I enliven it with some hazard striping – it’s not Necromunda without hazard stripes.
- Paint the whole base with GW Leadbelcher, Vallejo Gunmetal or any other plain metallic paint. You could even spray-prime for this, although I try and keep the metal out of the deepest recesses.
- Take a heavily thinned down, warm brown paint, like GW Mournfang Brown, or Vallejo Cavalry Brown, and slap it into the recesses of the base, along the bottom of ‘lips’ where a raised plate meets a lower plate. Splash it onto flat/raised areas in some patches too. Don’t bother being neat.
- Apply a heavy black-wash to the entire thing. This should darken it up and sort of covers up the transitions between metal and brown.
- Drybrush everything with orange, I use GW’s Troll Slayer Orange. This step does most of the work in making things look rusty.
- Optional: At this stage I do the hazard stripes. I find it’s quickest to do the whole area in a dull yellow, like Vallejo Yellow Ochre, and add the black stripes afterward. This helps get an even coat of yellow by allowing broader strokes. Often yellow will need a second coat. Black goes on much easier/smoother for creating the stripes. I just freehand and don’t bother masking – you can make them regular enough to read as straight from a distance.
- Apply a cautious drybrush/very light highlight with a silver, like GW Ironbreaker. Pay particular attention to edges, the most orange rusty bits, and if you like, paint some random scratches on big flat areas to add some interest.
I am used to doing this in batches on the elaborate sculpted GW bases, but it works fine on scratch builds. Any more or less flat GW plastic bit can be glued to a base, spare pieces from tank/vehicle kits are ideal. Plasticard is easy to cut into oblongs, as I mentioned above, and it’s not hard to trim it into a curve along the line of the base if you need. I also like using fine mesh under cut-outs of plasticard, to help add texture:
Genghis Cohen’s Infinity Bases
This scheme is meant to look like fully oxidised metal. Science bods, don’t come at me with whether that’s a real thing or not. I just thought it was a way to do something that read as metal, without actually using metallic paints, which I try to avoid for Infinity, or the effort required for NMM bases.
- Basecoat the whole base with an orange-brown mix. Experiment as you like with the exact shade, I find my batches all end up slightly different, and that’s fine. I like to mix a bit of warm brown into Vallejo Orange Brown (which I find it a bit too vividly orange on its own).
- Paint some patches with a dull red, like Vallejo Gory Red.
- Drybrush with orange.
This is weirdly simple and probably not to everyone’s taste, but I think it works well if you bring out texture the right way with the drybrushing, and get the right tone on the basecoat. It can work for a lot of sculpted ‘tactical rock’ type bases and plain base surfaces, because it’s relatively dull and (at least to me) just reads as an oxidised metal background.
Primaris Kevin
I’m a big fan of having simple, unobtrusive bases that accent my preference for brightly colored models. With that in mind I use a combination of simple metallics and washes to produce something that looks industrial and just a little grimey, like the more active part of the hive.
- Start with a black base, or prime a metallic color like Army Painter Gunmetal.
- Use a copper color (I prefer Vallejo Game Air Copper) to accent certain pieces like raised buttons, depressions, or grates. You want to be consistent here and paint the same thing across your models.
- Wash the whole thing in Army Painter Dark Tone.
- Dry brush the edges in a silver color.
- Wash the recesses with another layer of Dark Tone. Think of the model as a series of levels, and make each subsequent level receive another layer of wash.
- Apply a grimey wash (I use the Sadly Defunct Secret Weapon Miniatures Sewar Wash, but I hear thinned Typhus Corrosion will work) to the inside edges of the lower levels. Think of this as an where the truly foul things run just below the top levels of the floor.
- Paint the rim black because that’s what the cool kids do.
That’s it! Feel free to accent with rust effects like Dirty Down, add hazard stripes, or toss in a skull or two. I prefer to keep it simple, but your models mean your rules!
Another method that only works if you do it with the models off the base is my Wax-on, Wax-off Method. The techniques we show in our Sector Mechanicus article are also viable.
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