"Back to Bases" - Oathsworn Bases

Green mud sucks at your boots
every stride a challenge 
as you trudge through the rain. 

- Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood

Welcome back to The Art of Caesura!

I hope you all had a happy Hallowe'en - my favourite time of year! Today we're continuing our look at Oathsworn: into the Deepwood. If you didn't get a chance to check out last week's post on painting the Giant Rats, you can do so here. 

Today we're going to look at how I'm going to do ALL my bases from Oathsworn. I needed a technique that would be quick, effective and easy to unify across all of the different models that come with this game...and I think I've cracked it!

Rather than specifically undercoating the bases, I started painting just over the rattle can overspray from when I was painting the actual model (i.e. Grey Seer over Chaos Black). The first colour I used was Contrast Militarum Green.

I've said before that painting with Contrast paints is more like painting with water colours than acrylics. Where with acrylics you might start with the darkest colour and layer your way up; with Contrast (or other transluscent paints of their ilk) it's best to start with the lightest colour and work your way down. 

Anyway, while the Militarum Green was still wet, I painted Creed Camo into the recesses. Doing this while wet helped the paints blend in an organic manner. 

To add some further visual interest - rather than just having the whole thing green - I painted on Wyldwood next into some of the recesses. 

Next came the secret weapon. The moss version of this paint has not had as much fanfare as it's rust vis-a-vis, but in my experience it works just as well! You just spotch a bit of this on with an old brush and if you want you can feather it out a bit with water and it does the rest for you! It's the Moss paint from Dirty Down. 

So, below is a rat up to this stage. I should pause by saying that, with an appropriately large brush, each of these steps only takes a few seconds per model, because this technique benefits by being quick and dirty, with random brush strokes. You just want to avoid touching the rat itself, but if you get its feet a bit dirty - that's fine too!

The final step was to turn a few of the deeper recesses into swampy puddles. Rather than dicking around with resin or water effects, I just gave a few areas on each base a lick of gloss varnish. 

Aaaaand done! This process is fast and fun and I've already done it on the Broodmother so I know that it scales up okay. 

Join me next week for more Oathsworn!

Watching: House of the Dragon

Next Week:

Beedy eyes in the dark...