How I texture figure bases

A few people have expressed an interest in learning how I texture my figure bases. Late last year a couple of people on the Lead Adventure Forum said they would really like to see a blog post on how I do it. So, here it is. This is not how to do it, it is just how I do it. I'm not sure if there is much that is original or different here, but hopefully some readers will find it of interest or useful.

The figures are based on 2mm thick MDF. I tend to use rounds for individual figures or rectangular shapes for weapons teams. The latter I tend to cut by hand from left over MDF and tailor the size to the weapons or figures that are to go on it. I chamfer the edges with a sharp blade, to avoid that distinctive step up for a base. I cover this in an earlier blog post which you can find here.

The figures are attached using PVA glue and, once dry, the figure's own base is blended into the MDF base using Milliput.

Normally, I'll do this before the figure is primed or painted, but if the base requires multiple figures I'll wait to do that once they are painted.

The next thing is to apply texture. In my case, I use a homemade mix of various sands. I live by the coast in Australia, so there are no shortage of beaches. The useful thing about having a dog is that I always have a poo bag handy if I spot an interesting sample of sand.

I keep jars with sands of various coarseness and use these as I need, depending on the project. 

For most basing I have a custom mix of sand, the aim here is to avoid any uniformity in texture. The odd pieces of broken sea shell add to the variety.

The figure base is coated in a thin mix of PVA glue. If the glue is too thick you will lose the texture of the sand, so best to keep it diluted at about 75:25 with water.

The base is then dipped into the sand mix.

Once dry, I then use an old toothbrush to dislodge any loose sand. It's then sealed with a very diluted PVA and water mix (about 9 parts water to 1 part PVA). I find this helps seal the sand in place, but also provides a plastic covering to the sand which makes painting much easier.

If the figures are unpainted, then both figure and base are primed at this stage with my preferred primer for each particular project. Unpainted figures are then painted and varnished before any more work is carried out on the texture. The base is painted according to the terrain the figure will be used in. I will do two coats, normally a darkish brown base coat and then a lighter sandy coloured dry brush to pick out the texture of the sand. For this I tend to use various Dulux household emulsion paints. I buy them in sample pots and then dilute them at about 50:50 with water. This helps the paint flow better and also makes the paint dry with more of a matt finish.

This now brings us to the foliage and grass finish. I do this in two distinct stages. If you look at the natural world there is a great variety in the shades of grasses, even of the same variety. I aim to mimic this with my figures. I do this in two stages. The first layer I use my Base mix. This is an equal mix of Army Painter Battlefield Grass Green and Woodland Scenics Blended Turf (Green Blend).

As you can see, that makes for a good mix of different shades of green.

I use diluted PVA glue and apply it in patches to the base. You don't want to cover the entire base. The idea is to leave the textured sand coming through in various areas.

Try to avoid leaving a bare patch right around the figure's feet, that looks very unnatural. 

I dip the figure in the base mix, shake off any excess and then leave it to dry.

The next layer is the most important in my opinion, as this really adds a very natural dimension to the ground cover. I use static grass. In this case from Noch. 

Once again, I've made up my own custom mix adding variety in colour and in length.

This I apply with an electrostatic applicator. I've found I don't need to buy one of the expensive ones used by railway modellers, but I do need to avoid the very cheapest ones. In terms of power I've found it needs to be powered by at least a 9V battery to work well, anything less is not as satisfactory. Aliexpress or Temu are your friends here.

For this job I use Mod Podge glue. I find it an excellent adhesive for static grass and the matt type dries completely matt and so avoids any unsightly glossy patches on the base.

Once again, the glue is applied in patches. I only apply it where I have the base mix and even then I don't fill the entire area with glue.

Once the static grass has been applied I wait for about 30-60 secs. I then turn the base upside down and strike it once with something fairly heavy like the handle of an old dining knife. This not only gets rid of excess and loose static grass, but I find it helps the grass that is attached to stand upright. With that the basing is finished.

I know for some people this is several stages too many, but I think what enhances so many modelling projects is the depth and layering of paint and other effects. The natural world is filled with colour, shades and variety and if that's reflected in our miniature versions then it adds to the immersion and sense of realism.

2025 - a gaming year in review

Well, it seems 2025 was a particularly productive year, something I hadn't quite realised until I started putting a retrospective together. Followers of the blog will know it was only a week ago that I posted a review of my Chain of Command related activities, but looking back at other rules and periods it dawned on me that there was more than enough to warrant a second post. Excuse the indulgence! 

The biggest new painting project for the year was undoubtedly the German tribes for Infamy, Infamy. I didn't buy the figures during the year, which is partly why they became a 2025 project, they were long overdue painting. The vast bulk are from the Victrix plastic range, with shield transfers from Little Big Men Studios.

The few metal figures in the collection are from Wargames Foundry, like this group of wailing women.

As mentioned, the spur to paint the figures was to play games using Infamy, Infamy. My regular opponent Dave has quite a Roman collection and they were just awaiting suitable opponents. I wrote up a detailed report of one of our first games, which you can find in this post. 

The figures also featured in a number of games at the club.

I needed to add a small group of slingers to the German force and adapted those from a set of Gripping Beast Dark Age Warriors that I had lying around. Little did I know, but that decision would then lead me down a completely different rabbit hole. One thing led to another and within very little time I had a Saxon warband. A long story, but one you can follow in more detail in this post. 

This was inspired in part by our Dux Britanniarum campaign Warriors of the Old North. We played the first game at the tail end of 2024 and it continued into the first half of 2025 with another three games. 

All the figures came from Dave's collection, so there has never been a need for me to create an additional warband for this campaign. Well there you go, sometimes this hobby can lead you down all sorts of unexpected paths. 

When it came to basing those Saxons I did it with a number of rule sets in mind. That started me thinking about how I could use some of my existing figures for other periods for different rule sets. 

I have a number of Hundred Years War figures that were created with Lion Rampant in mind. While those rules were fine for a casual game at the club, I was keen to do something on a grander scale. I'd played my first game using Midgard in April. That was a big, multiplayer scenario set during the Trojan War and was very enjoyable. 

When I saw that James Morris had compiled lists for the Hundred Years War I looked to see if I had enough figures to put together a French and English force. I was close, but not quite close enough. What I did have, were a number of Perry plastic sprues that would provide me with enough figures. For a reasonably small investment of time I could add the various crossbow men, archers and men-at-arms to make up the numbers needed. 

The only other additional work was to make up a handful of suitably based figures to represent both French and English heroic leaders.

All that remained was to create suitably sized sabot bases of the standard 120mm Midgard width that would hold up to eight figures per unit.

Our first game used the lists for Agincourt. We decided to see how the rules would play out if we created a scenario that tried to mirror the actual battle. Anyone familiar with Agincourt will know that is likely to create a game with a decidedly English bias. Nonetheless, we thought it might be a good way to test out how well the rules replicated the historical situation. True to that narrative, the French struggled across the muddy ground to confront the English. Those that did make it across came to grief in front of the stakes set up by the archers. French courage was not lacking and their heroic leaders racked up a significant number of reputation points leading charges. While few fell in combat, the same cannot be said for the men they were leading, which ultimately assured English victory. 

That was a satisfying result, in so much as we felt the rules were able to give a plausible historical outcome. That inspired a second game, using the 'defend the hill' scenario in the Midgard rulebook. That delivered a more satisfying game, where the opportunities for victory were more evenly balanced and with the outcome only decided toward the very end. 

As it happens, the sabot bases also work for another set of medieval rules Blood and Horse Droppings by Rob Jones. I've played these before and as Rob is a medieval historian there's no surprise that these do a good job of focussing on the challenges of command in the period. Given I had the figures and bases it made sense to give the rules a run out again at the club.

Much comes down to decisions made by commanders as they enter or continue to fight in melee. As always with the period (and in common with Midgard), leadership and heroic deeds count for much. By the way, the rules are free and available as a pdf download from Rob's website Historian in Harness.

Having played a giant Trojan War game using the Midgard rules, our host also wanted to try doing something similar, but this time using Hail Caesar (or, as the detractors at the club like to call it 'Fail Caesar'). These were my first games using those rules and I have to say, they didn't grab me. Despite the game looking quite spectacular with hundreds of 28mm figures, I found the rules rather vanilla and the games not as engaging as Midgard.

O Group was a rule set that consumed many of my evenings at the club. We managed to play through both the France 1940 and the 1941-43 Eastern Front supplements. For these we used my opponent's large 15mm collection and terrain, most of which was amassed for Flames of War, but has since been repurposed for O Group. 

It's not a complex set of rules, but it does have a lot of nuances. We found it really benefited from repeat play and without keeping too long a gap between games.

We like the system, but we do have one gripe. That's with the scenarios and in particular the victory conditions. Despite setting objectives that can be captured, any game can also be won by inflicting a number of casualties on your opponent. As a result, we've often found the game coming down to our ability to pick off low hanging fruit to rack up those casualties, rather than a focus on capturing key objectives.

More recently we started playing the scenarios from the Normandy supplement, which was an opportunity to use my 12mm collection which I had created with O Group in mind. 

The 12mm collection also saw use at the club playing Crossfire, where I introduced the rules to a gamer I have known since my Advanced Squad Leader days.  

Despite the disparity in the size of their respective rule books, he found much to like about Crossfire's elegant simplicity. Talking of which, I've been using the elegantly simple 2'x2' introductory scenarios designed by friend of the blog Dick Bryant. It's been a very useful tool for taking people through the rules, whether they be new players, or those just inquisitive to discover how the rules play out. For those games I've been using my 20mm terrain and the multi-based figures I still have in 20mm for playing Crossfire (more about those here).

Playing games set during the American War of Independence using the Sharp Practice rules is of particular interest, but 2025 saw very little of that. Sadly, there's only so much game time available each year. However, that period was not entirely neglected. I was able to paint up three groups of ragged Continentals, a lovely set from Eureka Miniatures.

There was only a solitary game using Sharp Practice and that was set during the Peninsular War, not in the rebellious American colonies. However, there were no complaints from me. Once again, our host supplied a magnificent table and an equally magnificent selection of figures.

John Savage, the author of What A Cowboy, very kindly shared a draft version of his modern variant of those rules entitled What a Cartel (these have since been published in the 2025 Lard Magazine). It was an opportunity to dig out my rarely used figures and terrain for Afghanistan and we ran a simple extraction scenario, where a team of private military contractors attempt to save a downed helicopter crew.

Whilst not miniatures, I also played through the whole of an Undaunted: Stalingrad campaign with a good friend. He's an avid historian of the war and an equally enthusiastic player of board games, but any attempt I've made to entice him over to playing miniatures has failed. I've long since given up hope of bringing him over to the dark side, but that doesn't mean we don't continue enjoying gaming together.

So, another full year of gaming. It's funny really, because that's not how I felt about the year when I was first reflecting back. For some reason my mind focussed on the lost opportunities and disruptions. In hindsight these now seem minor and while a year with even more gaming would have been great, it would be churlish to complain. Huzzah for 2025.