Hey all, I'm new here, and have been scouring the forums for tutorials on effective basing at 6mm scale. I've been away from Epic for a long time, and when I was last playing, the bases of my poor abused Blood Angels were treated with a simple coat of Goblin Green.

I've got a 3,000pt Eldar army ready to rock and roll, and I'd like to get them looking good. Has anyone got any warnings on pitfalls to avoid and suggestions on techniques for great and eye-catching basing?

The colour scheme will be white and turquoise, and we'll mainly be playing on grass, desert and urban battlefields.

_________________
Industrious, red-robe wearing member of the PCRC

Ahh, bases

There are a few good websites kicking about. Best place to start would be dropship: http://www.dropship.org.uk/. Carl's got loads of nice pictures and some nice bases plus he gives a basic talk on how he achieved it - a great start for some ideas.

Magebolt also has some excellent bases - check his photobucket:
http://s10.photobucket.com/albums/a116/mageboltrat/

For myself I went with a snow theme on my bases and have attempted to model on little details such as bushes, static grass, collapsed ruins, sculpted paths, etc. They've come out with some success. For example, here are my some of my sentinels:

Fine sand + few tufts

For sand, I use a mix of fine (80%) and medium (20%) brown ballast from Woodland Scenics (thanks to Onyx for the tip)
For tufts, I've bought some mininaturen/silflor tufts. Theses tufts are ready to be glued just before putting sand on the base. 4 colors are available in the range.
To add some color to the sand, once glued, a drop of Gryphone sepia at some place then a drybrush woth ocre color (bubonic brown) followed by another one of pure white.

Few pics of stands I've done with this technique:





I bought tufts from this shop, refs are 717-2Xs (letter "s" is for small sheets) and WS ballast from Antics Online.

Coo, that was quick! Thanks very much for the pointers, chaps – much appreciated; and the piccies are very useful. Seeing such lovely figures (fantastic Tomb Spyders and scenery, scream – scratchbuilds?) and paintjobs makes it hard to concentrate on the bases, but they really set the models off.

Looks like a stop off at Woodland Scenics might well be in order.

_________________
Industrious, red-robe wearing member of the PCRC

I fully validate any praise about mininatur and woodland scenics goods when it comes to base and terrain.

I'll gladly show you what a fair basing job can do for a poor paintjob.

That said, I have a nice coffee grinder that will grind to varying coarseness. I have learned that only a limited range of things should go in the coffee grinder -- chocolate chips (mistaken for coffee beans early one morning) should not. But I have had good success tossing rice in the grinder, and this seems to make for nice, fairly inexpensive texture for my bases.

I vary between a variety of methods. Some basrs get greenstuff sculpting and debris while others get sand and fine gravel. Both use fine turf and course turf from woodland scenics. I avoid static grass because it looks wrong with the scale.

_________________
-Vaaish

Hey, that looks familiar.