21 May 2011

Mondo Cheap Basing

I mounted my newest spaceship sculpt on a flight-stand in order to prime and paint it and while doing so realized I have yet to share my basing technique.  Like all my techniques, it focuses on being super-cheap yet still functional as well as hopefully looking comparable to commercially available options.

Custom flight-stand


To create the base pictured here I simply press a spherical object of appropriate size into a block of Sculpy.  In this case my object was a plastic 1 tablespoon measuring spoon.  I set a cylindrical piece of plastic scrap in the bottom of the depression.  I then pour water-putty into the depression made by the spoon.  I will usually have one or two of these base molds set up and when I'm mixing up water-putty for one of my other projects, I pour the inevitable extra putty into these molds.  After half a dozen or so spaceship projects I have plenty of extra bases now.  After 100 minutes or so the putty is set enough to remove from the Sculpy mold.  Remove the cylindrical plastic scrap with some tweezers; you now have a small impression on the top of the base in which you can insert a flight stand rod.  Speaking of which, I simply glue three pieces of thick spaghetti together for the flight rod.  The  CA glue ensures plenty of strength and will not warp the spaghetti; even better is the height of the flight stand can be different for every ship.

Sculpy mold for flight-stand base

Too much camera flash!
Balanced ship design


I've been including Ship Design Sheets (SDS) for some of my ship sculpts in these posts.  The SDS are used in my homebrew game War In Space.  The game is a simple affair that's not even 10 pages of text, made for me by me, but if you're interested in a free rules set please feel free to contact me and I will send you a PDF. 



 

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