Cork Bases

By now you've probably seen someone use a wine cork carved up to look like a rock for a base. It's become pretty common these days, especially in the display pieces. It's fairly easy to do, but I prefer a slightly different method. I like to use cork tiles. They're easy to find. Usually 6" x 6" or 12" x 12" squares. They're designed to attach to a wall to turn it into a cork board. They make fabulous basing material as well.

As you can see, the texture is pretty rough on the surface. This is a really cheap grade tile as it's not been processed down to smaller chunks. This is a good thing.

When you tear the tile you reveal the wonderful random texture this chunky cork provides. Once painted it looks just like a broken rock shelf. I just tear off a piece that is bigger than my base and keep pulling bits off until it fits into the recess. You can certainly have it hang over the edge if you like. The other nice thing about using a tile is they're usually .25" thick and flat on 2 surfaces, making stacking quite easy. Once I have a shape I'm satisfied with I go ahead and superglue it to the base. You can use wood glue to cement the layers together, but I find superglue does the job too.

Once the glue is set you can go straight to priming or add additional decoration to the base. I added Woodland Scenics ballast of various grades to the surface around the cork on the first base. I want this one to end up looking like a rock in a field. The other two I filled in the gaps on the base and in between the tiles with Apoxie Sculpt.

Priming

Cork is pretty absorbent to paint, but you don't need to do anything special to prime it. I just used my standard Dupli-color Sandable black primer.

Painting

Here I've gone ahead and painted the rocks all the same. I'm going to use these bases in the next segment on Snow, so I wanted a very cold look. I started out very dark and worked up to have some very high contrast.

Paints used:

• GW Shadow Grey
• GW Space Wolves Grey
• Black Ink
• Blue Ink
• VMC 153 Pale Grey Blue
• VMC 002 Foundation White

Method used:

1. Basecoat with Shadow Grey
2. Wash with 2:1 Black Ink : Blue Ink
3. Drybrush with Shadow Grey
4. Drybrush with 5:3 Shadow Grey : Space Wolves Grey
5. Drybrush with 5:2 Space Wolves Grey : Shadow Grey
6. Drybrush with VMC 153
7. Drybrush with 1:1 VMC 153 : VMC 002

Finishing Touches

For the field base I painted up the dirt and added a few bits of static grass for a springtime look. All set to move on to the Snow stage!