With the Knives in the Darkness Kill Team event looming, I have been assembling my chosen team of Inquisitorial agents with a squad of sisters of silence. The inquisitorial agents I have already built on standard plastic Sector Imperialis bases, but sisters of silence I have left unattached to the bases, as i find with big cloaks such as theirs they are easier to paint when you can get to them from below. Anyway, I decided I would have a go at 3d modelling my own 32mm bases for them and over a few lunch hours of modelling in blender, I came up with these:

Although I only need 5 I did 6 so i could print them and see which ones work best with the models.  This got me thinking more about the bases I use for my other armies and the themes I have adopted for each, and decided to do a quick blog post showing each.

My deathwatch army was originally created when I decided to enter the Armies on Parade competition, so the bases had to fit with the display board with a consistent theme. I used torn up cork tiles with texture paste painted to look like a rocky desert, decorated with xenos skull and dry grass tufts and using pigment powders on the model to try and integrate them better with the environment.

The basing for my marine army is a bit more mixed with a combination of scratch built bases as above, 3d printed bases and shop bought scenic bases, but all following the same basic theme of a rubble strewn urban environment, as I found this integrates quite well with the 'tactical rock' type pieces often attached to GWs marine models. As always with a few skulls and grass tufts for additional decoration.

In the same way as the marines, the bases for my Aeldari are design to try and work with the craftworld ruins parts GW uses on many of the miniatures in this range. I used a texture roller from Greenstuff world with Eldar symbols pressed into either clay or milliput, which is then broken into fragments when dry to be attached to the base t try and represent bits of ruin. I then use fine sand and PVA glue to give it a sandy desert environment along with the usual skulls and the occasional dry grass tuft.

My Tau bases are probably the simplest just using a texture paste and painting it using gloss agrax earthshade to give a wet mud effect and use a lot more grass tufts of a greener variety, as well as a few skulls of course.

Another simple scheme for these, cork for  a gray rocky terrain, with pools of bubbling goo in between, I used half sphere stick on beads for the bubbles (pilfered from my wife), liberally coated in Nurgles Rot and often with items partially submerged to try and give the impression of depth, in this case yet another skull.

I think I have managed to give each army it's own identity whilst still keeping the basing fairly and easy to replicate with each base looking slightly different. Let me know in the comments if there is anything you would do differently? Do I need more skulls?

Thanks for reading.