Making a snow cliff base

An online store had some Micro Art Studio Bases: Chaos 40mm & 50mm (7). (https://www.miniaturemarket.com/ma012-2.html) on sale so I decided to give them a try.

The original sculpt is a lava setting with some steel and Chaos symbols but gave the general shape and style I was thinking of. Figure it would save time from building up rock and cork. They come with the insert and a custom base for it to fit in. The quality seems good and easy to work with.

First step was gluing in the inserts. Issue I had here was the insert does not fit snug and has a lip rather than a flat bottom reducing the overall contact. There was a few times during this process the insert popped out of a couple of them. When doing more or if it happens again with the ones made I plan to put in green stuff as an additional contact.

Onto priming. My default for stone or concrete is a grey primer, picked up at the local hardware store, to reduce painting.

Gave it a day a dry before applying a Dark tone wash pretty liberally to the whole base.

Next a quick, somewhat heavy dry brush of lighter grey. On camera this made very little to any noticeable difference. Actually skipped after the first few because after the next steps it made no change in my eyes.

Then a lighter bit more targeted dry brush of a light grey / white paint, in this case Frostbite. The front one I did hit a bit heavy on some of the out cropping. Decided to let it ride rather than repaint.

For the extra bit of effect and texture Snow flock was added. Used a toothpick to place small patches of PVA along the chain sections, symbols, and a few other locations. For the extra spots I targeted recesses and thinking were snow would settle, attempted to be a little random.

To finish it all up I sprayed a watered down mixture of PVA to seal in the snow and added arcs.

Last step was to add the model, in this case Privateer Press Hordes Trollblood Raiders, Lookouts, and Valka. As expected with pre done bases a few models took a bit of experimenting to find points they did not hovering feet. One model in particular, as you can see in the photo, just could not fit right. The inserts were easy to drill but a couple did break loose of the base when drilling.

Overall I like how they turned out for the small amount of time and cost involved. Not including dry time or model placement, when done in a batch each base took about 5 minutes each to complete. I do plan on getting more of this brand of inserts for future products but most likely in a different style. Thank you for reading and please comment if this helped or you try it.

Supplies

Bases

Grey Primer

Dark Tone wash by Army Painter

Grey paint

Frostbite by P3

Snow flock by Army painter

Toothpick

PVA