Help with bases

[DiscipleOfTheWord]

Hi everyone, for my Heresy Iron Warriors I base them all in a trench warfare style, with a thick mud created using sand, PVA glue, filler and brown paint coated with gloss varnish, which both takes a long time to make and is very difficult to apply, plus never coming out in the same colour or consistency twice. It looks like this (ideally, it often doesn't though):

 

 

So since the above situation isn't ideal, I decided to use some stirland battlemire on my latest 10 marines, which looks like this:

 

 

As you can see, it looks very different from the previous model, with a very different consistency. I think I prefer the first model to be honest. So, what can I do to make the stirland battlemire look more like the mud mix? I really don't want to go back to using that as it would be very difficult to put it over my stirland bases, and I want the army to look consistent. Thoughts?

 

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[Grotsmasha]

How about mixing an empty pot (or three) of the mix minus the PVA, then when it's time to apply it, all you need to do is add the PVA, creating a more reliable result? Also recording how much of everything's % of the mix somewhere will also help to recreate consistent results.

 

Cheers,

Jono