DKoK Artillary WIP - the Base

 

Greetings and welcome back!  I've been absent with the posts of late...and 2025 trend that I hope to reverse.  As usual, I have not been idle at the workbench, just at the computer. I thought I'd talk a bit about the base for the Death Korps of Krieg artillery piece I've had on the painting table for a while since completing the heavy stubber team.

After gluing down the scenic bits for a base, I like to use a good quality wood glue to apply ground cover as I did here. In my experience, wood glue holds better to the plastic than PVA or white glue. Sometimes I'll use a product like Vallejo's Black Lava or similar.  But for 40K, I have for years used a simple mix of fine and medium coarse model railroad ballast. In the case of this artillery base, I considered that during a siege, this artillery piece might be in place for some time, so the ground around it might become beat down and muddy where the crew congregate to manage the equipment. I've used poster putty (blue tac, etc.) to mask the areas I wanted to appear well trodden then glued down the ballast/gravel.

After allowing the glue to dry, I removed the putty and applied GW Agrellan Earth technical paint. A note on removing the putty, this had to be done carefully because glue had been spashed and dried on the putty, so pulling the putty up did start to lift the glue in spots. Had I been more careful with the application of glue, i could have avoided this bit. But back to the Agrellan Earth, as this paint dries, it cracks and makes a nice dried mud texture. In hind sight, it might have been fun to take a troopers foot and make a tone of overlapping foot prints as this dried - but I'm not sure if that would have really helped or not in the end, at least at this scale.

Anyway, this looked pretty decent prior to painting.  clearly some dried muddy areas amid the rough ground texture. with the gun in place, you can see the well trodden areas as they appear around the field piece. 

 

At this stage I paused and finished the Heavy Stubber team.  When finally coming back to paint, I laid down the base colors, the washed everything with GW Agrax Earthshade.

I then added some GW Athonian Camoshade to the muddy bits and all around the edge of the base, though honestly, it ended up leaving only a very subtle dark green to the shading. Probably could have skipped that step, or gone in hard with a couple more coats.

Then it was time to dry brush the ground and sandbags, tidy up the details and add highlights.  The final results are above in the title pic and in this pic from another angle.

Now we're ready to glue the field piece down once it is complete enough to do so.  I'm currently working on it, and in my next post I'll share the process and the progress for painting the gun and crew.  I batch painted the crew to a point while painting the heavy stubber team, but did not bring them to completion at that time. The gun has sat before now waiting in the queue with only an initial prime and grey base coat.
 

We'll see if I can get back to my old posting rhythm, so expect another post later this week.

Cheers and Happy Gaming!