Adeptus Titanicus - Basing Tutorial

Merry Christmas everyone!  If you're visiting the blog today for a hobby fix or to follow our progress then thanks for joining us. 😊 Tylar here, a bit later than originally planned,  all that Xmas food and drink meant a bit of an afternoon snooze before more hobby time. 😛

As hobbyists all three members of the blog take great pride in what we do be it painting, sculpting, styrene(plasticard) work and kit-bashing or just in general discussion about the things we enjoy and like to share. 

To that end I've been working on the bases for my Titans for my chosen Legio, the defenders of Calth and general last stand heroes the Legio Praesagius.  If you haven't listened to or read Honour the Dead then I thoroughly recommend it. 

Onto the Titans!

Having seen quite a lot of people doing really cool things with their bases I wanted to emulate Calth and the Romanesque based architecture and nature of the majority of the 500 worlds. I'll be honest I haven't done a great deal of historical research but went with what I thought would be a 'flavour' of what that type of society would project in their buildings and roads. 

I watched a great tutorial by Myles Davies from Lil'Legend Studio on his Patreon which gave me a great grounding for how to achieve what I was after and there will be a link at the bottom. Please do check it out. As a paid member of his Patreon myself it's well worth it I assure you. 

I started with the Titans I had already posed. I had built these as per the instructions to get a better feel for the kits before posing further Titans. I had also seen that quite a few people had had problems posing their kits so didn't want to fall into the same traps. 

My first base was my Reaver Titan's. It seemed the easiest to do as it's pose was static and would make my initial attempt hopefully easier.  I broke up the base by using a cork coaster I bought from Amazon and two types of plastic-card.  One flat and one textured in small squares.  This can be bought from greenstuffworld.com where they sell all manner of great hobby related products. I'll place the link at the bottom. 

Once this had dried I carved off the excess material and added a small length of styrene strip to create the look of a small wall separating the 'paved section' from the road section.

I decided I wanted add a small bit of detail so cut into the cork and cut some small pieces of plasti-card to add some steps to link the two levels.  I also cut off the balcony pieces of two of the small AT building sections to create walls.

And there you have it.  All I did after this was to carve damage into the low wall I created by using the small styrene strip

For my second Reaver I decided I wanted to create something a little different and used some of the floor sections from the AT scenery to building a floor area that looked slightly more industrial.  I also have the greenstuff roller from greenstuffworld.com which is fantastic for creating your own cables.  Having rolled some of this out previously I then used my pin-vice to drill a hole all the way through.  I then threaded a paper clip through the centre which allowed me to bend it into a curve and pin it into the plastic at the same time.

Below you can see the pre drilled holes and the greenstuff rolled cable with the paperclip through it.

After completing this I felt I had got an idea of how to create the different visuals I wanted and began exploring bigger and better things. What follows are the bases I then created for my other Titans.  First are those for my Warhounds.  At each stage I used blu-tac to ensure the pose wouldn't be affected by the 'visual' I was trying to achieve and also to ensure that it didn't detract from the Titan itself.

I was very privileged to receive some of the first 3D printed Rhino's from our in house specialist Col. Hertford.  There are many in the blogosphere that are against this.  Now we're not attempting to subvert GW's IP or take away from there ability to trade in miniatures.  However currently the old Epic miniatures and their more up to date equivalents aren't commercially available so we've taken the collective decision to fill that void with printed miniatures until such time as GW re-create these mini's or begin to produce them.  Until that time we will just have to do what we can ourselves to help us bring great models to the table-top.

Then I took that Rhino and wrecked it! 😁 It may be hard to see but I carved a small set of tracks to show the left track had come off the drive wheels as the tank had been damaged.

Finally I decided to add a little more detail to my second Warlord's base.  I decided I wanted it to be striding through a large garden area, so well described in Honour the Dead, so had to work out how to make the Titan's foot seem to have sunk into the ground as it displaced it's weight.  To do this I traced the Warlord's foot onto the cork and then gouged out the area.  After this I used greenstuff to line the edges and then pressed the foot into this to create the effect of soil and turf being displaced.

Below you can see the extra detail I placed into the garden adding steps up from the paved area below and a paved walk-way to a corner patio area.  Originally I wanted to add columns but decided this would be additional unnecessary detail complicating the visual.

Here you can see how the Titan will likely look once it's been completed. 

Thanks for taking another look at what we've been up to.  Hopefully this will inspire more people to go that bit further on their bases by adding a little extra narrative. If anyone has any questions or wants to know more feel free to comment and ask questions below.

Greenstuff world - http://www.greenstuffworld.com/en/ 

Lil'Legend Studios -https://www.patreon.com/lillegendstudio

Only In Death Does Duty End

-Tylar