First Finished 'Marine' in Space and a Quick Tutorial

I managed to finish one of the Alternative Armies Bob Olley Not space marines this week. There's a few things I'll tweak on the next ones I paint up and I'll probably not be as heavy handed on the rust/wear on the armour but overall I'm pretty happy with the finished paint job:

As a couple of people asked in the comments of the previous posts I've put together a tutorial for the rusty bases so here you go.

Most of what I learned about putting together interesting bases came from reading through the amazing tutorials and looking at the amazing eye candy on the Massive Voodoo blog so I can't take full credit for the results so after you've had a look at my quick tutorial go give their blog a gander as it'll inpire you.

http://massivevoodoo.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/tutorial-overview.html

Step 1: Picking your scrap

Have a dig through your bits box for some random scrap, anything will do as once it's all painted up it looks suitably metallic and industrial. I tend to keep a tub of all my base off cuts as these work really well as rusted through sheet metal so try to keep hold of any integral bases that you've removed or any broken slottas.

 If you're planning on doing quite a few of these bases make sure you've got a good surplus of bits and pieces that you can bring to the base, old watches, old electronics pieces of model kits, sprue, flashing old green stuff it's all good.

Step 2: Covering your fingers in glue

There's no right way to put these bases together so just slap some of your pieces onto the bases and start building up layers. I've tried to build the bases up in two layers the first being piping wiring etc the kind of stuff you'd have running underneath the main floor in some kind of space-hulk.

Once you've got your under floor area sorted try and pick out a couple of flat pieces for your crumbling flooring, this also helps as it'll give you a relatively flat area to pin your mini's feet.

Before I glued the main flat area to the piping I scuffed up the surface with one of my files to give it a bit more texture. After the flat areas are glued down you can start filling any voids and spaces underneath with cogs, wires and any other small bits of scrap you have lying around. I added more extra texture to the flat areas by sprinkling filings from my desk top into some super-glue liberally spread all over the place.

Once this is all dry you should be able to pin your mini to the scrap heap.

STEP 3: Painting

Once you've under-coated your base black give it dry brush with a couple of different silvers.

Once your silver is dry, dry-brush up from dark bronze to light, next take your orange paint and slap some on randomly on the edges and in patches to simulate rust.

Next take your verdigris colour paint and water it down into a wash and slap some on in random patches for some extra colour.

For the next stage I used some Vallejo Pigment to simulate crusty rust you can probably get the same effect with a lighter orange paint. Take an old brush and gather some up directly from the pot and lightly dust your base, you may want to have a few practise goes on something until you get a 'feel' for the powder.

For the last stage I took a fluorescent Yellow Vallejo paint and painted in all the deep recesses and edges of the base to simulate radioactive glowing slime. Lastly I slapped a little bit of gloss varnish on the pools of 'liquid'. There you go one slimy rusty pile of scrap base all it need now is the edge neatening up and you're done.