Drowned Earth Bases

I recently got my kickstarter pledge for Ulaya chronicles, and it got me excited to finally get going on my Drowned Earth models that I picked up a while back. I decided to base them with unique styles for each faction, but I was having trouble figuring out what to do.

Obviously any drowned earth bases need lots of plants, but I wanted to do more than that. And I hate doing water effects on bases. So I looked at some post-apoc art, and dug around in my materials until I found this sheet of little square tile looking things.

I had used some of it before to add random bits of debris to bases and terrain, but I started getting an idea for a while crew of models based on this stuff. Im imagining that this is the tile floor of a building that has long since been destroyed. Now it is overgrown and dirty, and only some bits of the floor are showing through. To that end, I started cutting up little pieces and sticking them onto my bases.

I think it’s pretty close to what I had in mind. One problem I noticed is that the stuff is pretty thick, so ill have to blend those edges into the bases a bit before I continue.

Next up, I mixed up some green stuff, and started blending the edges of the plasticard into the bases.

I quickly realized that this would lead to a result which looked like the flooring underneath the dirt was actually raised up out of the dirt. Exactly the opposite of what I want. So I went ahead and filled in a nice layer of greenstuff around the entirety of each base, leaving a few holes here and there and between cracks, to look like low spots.

The next step was to add some sand to the bases. I like to start with a medium grit and then coat the whole thing with fine grit. I made sure to only cover the edges of the tile sheets, and then sealed it all down with watery PVA.

Then I mounted all of the models on the bases so that I can prime everything together. These guys are metal so they needed to be pinned.

I primed them all with black spray primer, and then started painting the ground cover. I used burnt umber as a base coat, and then drybrushed on some Khaki. I find this color combination gives it a good amont of contrast but still looks pretty realistic.