Basius 2 From Wargames Bakery - Getting Started and the Projects to Come

They're here at last! Earlier this week I got to experience the rush that you get when you find a box of Kickstarter goodies waiting for you. In this instance, it was two large resin squares from Wargames Bakery. Well actually, it was two of their new Basius 2 basing mold pads from their Kickstarter that was run between September and October last year. After a few delays, they were all delivered to Mantic last week, and shipped out this week. 

Initially I had backed for one pad - the Victoriana - as I had just backed the Infamy: Welcome to the Big Smoke Kickstarter and wanted a way of basing them. Each pad is double sided, which gives you thousands of combinations of different designs depending on where you press into the mold. I added a second more generic Imperial pad for other projects.

As you can see, the Victoriana is mostly cobbled streets with some pavement and light debris on one side, with pavement, rail tracks, sand and ocean waves on the other, while the Imperial is mostly different levels of broken ground.

After a while of waiting for the pads, I started hoarding projects to use them on so they didn't go to waste. What started out as Infamy Kickstarter basing has expanded slightly...

The Age Of Sigmar box and my Arcanist Warband for Malifaux. The AOS figures will be a self contained project away from my Vampire Counts as I don't intend to add to either the Sigmarines or the Chaos dudes. This means it would look cooler if they were based the same way, to be on the same battlefield. They and the Arcanists will be based using the Imperial mold, though probably in different colours.

A collection from my "I'm going to paint these once I've had a little more practice..." box. Top Left to right - Infamy Ton minus the busts, Talullah Belle, Nouveau, Cleo and Lucy from the Darkstorm range of Ares Mythologic. Down below are The Beast of Bakerloo from the Infamy Ton and JoeK's current 4 Odessey miniatures - Hephestus, Heracles, Atalanta and Apollo. The last four will be on Imperial, while the others will be on Victoriana.

The Union from Guild Ball. These guys are the ones from the Kickstarter that didn't come with any of the nice resin base inserts so they'll probably be getting partial Imperial topped up with grass and sand to match the resin insert designs.

My currently boxed Knight Models collection. I hadn't realised it had gotten quite so large, but they'll all be going on Victoriana. A lot of them have the new style molded plastic bases but recently I picked up a batch of 30 blank lipped ones from Element Games for about £2 so they can be used instead.

One Warmachine Retribution of Scyrah all in one box to go in Imperial.

So those are the projects I have lined up. First though, I thought I'd have little test run.

The way you use the bases is fairly simple. Mix yourself some green stuff, slap it on the base you want to use it on and cover the area you want on it. Add a little water to the Basius pad in the area you want (I just use a large brush to dollop out my painting water onto it) and press the base onto the mold with a firm, even pressure. Once you lift the pad away, you should have something that looks like these below. The top three are Imperial, while the cobbled one is Victoriana. 

I made a couple of mistakes on these. The first one was on the 40mm base, I forgot the golden rule about not using the blue and yellow bits that touch the other colour in the packaging as they are always rock solid and don't mix. This led, as you can see, to blue and yellow areas instead of even greens. It's not too much bother on that one as the blue bit is exactly where a chaos dude will have his foot, as you'll see shortly.

The second mistake is easily visible on the cobbled base. The first three bases, two Wyrd 30mm lipped and one GW 40mm, are all completely solid. The cobbled base came out of a Knight box, and has a tab slot in it which is easily identifiable as the mold has pressed green stuff into it. I'll probably be able to make something out of it (some form of street damage) but it's a good lesson to learn early.

To counter the second thing, I grabbed a couple of items.

It turned out that the tape in the dispenser is just the right width to be long enough to cover slots in 30mm bases, so you don't need a lot of it. 

I pressed it over the gap and into the edges of the base with a fingernail so it was flush to the base all over with only the edge bits sticking over. I then took the X-Acto blade around the edge of the base and peeled the excess away.

This now gives you a perfectly smooth surface to press onto the pad.

The right hand base was created by taking the normal layer of green stuff (in the previous efforts I tried not to make it too much higher than the base lip) and added a small arc on top of it to go deeper into the mold. This allows the creation of the curb and to give a bit more of a 3D element to the bases. While it won't work all the time, this allows you to pick and choose the area you want to portray on your base and fit it to the miniature, rather than rooting through your packs of pre-made bases wondering which one will fit the miniature's character and pose the best.

Once the green stuff had been left to dry for roughly 24 hours, I drilled through it for the pin I added to the Chaos dude's foot. As part of a happy accident I was able to use one of the mistake areas (the blue) as a guide for where to put it. A little filing is still needed on the edges, but that will have to wait for it to set a little longer. 

The downside to all this is the cost. The two that I picked up cost me roughly £50 including delivery, which isn't bad for the quality and usefulness of the item. The more expensive bit will be the greenstuff. On the 7 bases I've made so far, I've used roughly 4.5" of greenstuff, which is about 3 times as much as I've used in the last 10 years. It's not the cheapest of mediums to use for the mold, but it's probably the most effective. Milliput is the other main medium I'd be tempted to use, but as that can turn to mush easily when water is added, and you need some form of liquid on the mold to make sure it doesn't stick to it, Milliput might not be the best of options. 

Overall I think it'll take some learning to get it completely worked out, but I'm happy with my test results so now all I need to do is find the time and green stuff (got about another 2 feet of it) to make the bases and then get everything built for them.

Any one else get some or used the previous incarnation?