Introduction 

I'll admit, this has been a tough one for me. I've started & stopped research on it several times. This time out though, I'm finally happy with my results so I'm happy to share them. Some of you may recall my tests that I shared in our old blog, but this article will go a bit deeper than that.

First off, what is a "swamp" anyway? Most miniature enthusiasts consider a "swamp" base to have water on it. While many swamps are full of water, that may or may not be the look you're after.

The definition of a swamp: (taken from wikipedia) "A swamp is a wetland that features permanent inundation of large areas of land by shallow bodies of water, generally with a substantial number of hummocks, or dry-land protrusions. In the USA, swamps are usually regarded as including a large amount of woody vegetation, but elsewhere this may not necessarily apply, such as in African swamps dominated by papyrus."

Here's a couple of reference photos. The first one is a shot of a freshwater swamp in Florida. The second is of a Cypress swamp also in Florida.

Notice a key thing on both photos: lots of trees. Now if you're working on a diorama that's a fairly easy thing to pull off. On a miniature base = not so easy. Also of note from the definition: "features permanent inundation of large areas of land by shallow bodies of water, generally with a substantial number of hummocks, or dry-land protrusions." So right here is the mostly likely visual cue for a "swamp" base. Shallow water with hummocks of land sticking out of it. I like to add a rotten tree stump here & there to add to the idea that there's a lot of trees about, but that's me and I'm getting ahead of myself.

In my research I've settled on 3 different ways to build swamp bases. I'm positive that there are numerous other good techniques out there, but these are the 3 that I like best. Coincidentally, they also seem to fall into "easy," "medium," and "hard" difficulties as far as time and effort spent on each base is concerned. How convenient, eh? I'll split this article into 3 sections: Building, Painting, and Finishing. Each section will have multiple methods presented, so there's a lot of reading but a lot of ideas here. Let's get cracking.