Casualty basing

Three stages in basing the casualty figures.

I’ve not posted much from my own workbench lately so here’s a snapshot of the work in progress on basing the three Westphalian Landwehr casualties. I’m in the home straight but it still seems to be taking longer that I expected to get over the finishing line.

My customer supplied three 3mm thick circular plywood bases for these figures and you can see those in the picture above. I gloss and matt varnished the figures prior to gluing them to the bases and that’s the stage you can see in the leftmost figure. The next stage is to build up the basework to the level of the figures’ metal bases using putty. For this I use a mixture of green stuff and Sylmasta A+B putty. I find this mixture much easier to manipulate than pure green stuff. The middle figure has reached this stage.

After the putty has set, I apply a thin layer of slightly watered down PVA glue to the base and dip it into my tub of basing material. The core component on my basing material is N-gauge railway modelling ballast. This is a bit coarser than the sand that may wargamers use for basing and I prefer this texture. Along with that I dot around some bits and pieces of different sizes for variety. These are mostly other sizes of stone, the occasional piece of cat litter and sometimes a a small cork pellet. You can see this stage in the rightmost figure. Sometimes I need to a second selective coat of glue and ballast to fill in gaps. It’s important the let the first coat dry out thoroughly beforehand otherwise things can very very messy very quickly!

The fourth stage is paintwork. I’ll apply some darker earth tones across the base and paint the larger base elements (like the cat litter) before finishing off with some drybrushed coats of pale sandy colours. After that, I just need to glue the caps and muskets in place. Final pictures will follow once all three figures are complete.