Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about making sewer bases. This is a lot of fun. I'm making these for a big scaven project I'm doing and I'm going to walk you through exactly the steps I do to get there. Sewers are fun because you can do anything you want. Unlike many other bases where we can go out and reference reality, most sewers in the real world don't look like the sewers of the fantasy worlds that are eight or nine feet high with extra 10 feet across and they have multiple levels and layers to them and hidden doors and secret dungeons and all sorts of stuff. So instead we get to explore the realm of our imagination. I'm going to make a couple different bases here with you today and obviously this is all happening at two times speed and I'm just going to go ahead and tell you what I'm doing. My little workshop that you see here or my little pallet that I'm working on top of there is all gross because I'm going to use some clay and I don't like to get my normal mat all gross. So the first thing I want to do on my sewer is build up some height. I want to show the difference between what will eventually be the sewer and the water. So I'm going to use our old friend cork. So you saw how I laid the thing down, measured out of space, drew around it with a pen and then took a very sharp exacto and cut it out. I'm then going to glue it down and that will provide me a real nice height change for that. You can do sort of any structure you could imagine here. That is to say it doesn't have to be like I did with this sort of straight cut across the middle and as a point of fact I do a bunch of different bases throughout my scaven army because I had to do nine of these 120mm bases so I had all sorts of different configurations. Some with water, some without, so on and so forth. Don't worry if the cork doesn't cut exactly perfect, that doesn't matter. It's just fine. We'll clean it up later. We're going to cover everything with clay. Namely in this we're going to use some DOS modeling clay. Now you can use any kind of thing over the top of this. You can use green stuff, brown stuff, gray stuff. You can use milliput of any variety and so on and so forth. I'm using DOS modeling clay because that's what I want. If you're going to use milliput as you just saw there, use super fine white. This DOS is really good. You can get huge amounts quite cheap and it's air drying modeling clay. It's actually really nice for making bases. I love it because you just get so much for a relatively low price and again I had to make something like 300 of these bases so I didn't want to be bankrupt which is what green stuff would have done and even milliput was too expensive. You lay down a nice chunk and you notice I'm just kind of working it smooth. Now unlike milliput, you don't really have to keep your fingers super wet. It's not very tacky. It won't really stick to your fingers a huge amount. What I do here is just take a little water kind of at the end and I'll smooth it out. You'll see me do that but just start with a nice sized chunk and then I start leveling it out. I'm just using my finger to even it out over the bases. I've got both a big chariot style 120mm x 90mm base as well as a small 32mm round here and in both cases we're going to make room for a little sewer water to be flowing by because that will be fun. The way you see me doing there is just making sure it's nice and flush to that cork. Then I take just a little bit of water on my finger and I'm just smoothing it down. It doesn't need to be perfectly, completely smooth but here's a good trick to do so. Get it nice and wet like you see me doing there where you see me flatten everything out completely and then one of the things you can do once you've gotten rid of most of the big bumps that you can make sure your desk is nice and wet, flip the base over and then press it down really hard into kind of the wet flat cutting mat.  But I'm keeping notice that I don't go in with my finger totally wet. I wiped it on the mat first just to make sure that I've had that extra there. Next thing I'm going to do is I want to make some texture in this. You can do that in any way you like. You could manually sculpt in the texture. You could sit there and put in some elements that you want in a press that you made yourself or you can do what I'm doing here which is a good old-fashioned green stuff roller. This is the madness roller which is a mix of sort of cobblestones and weird otherworldly icons which I really liked. You don't want your either the if you're using DOS you don't want either the clay or the roller to be like super soaked. You want them to both be moist. If you miss a spot you see I just rolled into there. Boom now I've got some texture there. Jobs are good and it does need to be perfect. It's meant to be an underground sewer and you're good to go. If you have any spaces where you want to make some extra bricks you can always go in with anything. I'm just using a set of tweezers here and you see me literally just putting some more bricks into it you know kind of making them aligned with everything else. Once this is all painted and I have moss over the top and mud and everything like that any tiny inconsistencies you won't even notice anymore. And that's one of the keys you don't really want to worry about getting hung up on this. I see some people get really worried if their if their roll doesn't come out completely perfect they get really hung up on that. In the end you shouldn't ever just stop with the roller you can always have other stuff on top but you can always have other detritus in the in there you know whether it's a sewer like I'm doing here or whether it's um or whether it's you know any other kind of thing you might be rolling. Now the next thing I want to do is I want to recut my space and make it nice and flat but I'm only going to do that straight cut. I'm not going to peel the edges right now and the reason for that is because if you try to cut areas that are wet this is what'll happen. Notice how it started to pull. That'll happen with green stuff, with milliput, with this clay, with anything. When it's super wet still it's gonna it's not gonna give you a clean cut so instead we're just gonna let it dry. So I let it sit for about 24 hours which is when how long I would leave anything the air drying clay or or milliput or anything like that.  Nothing gets pulled. I don't make any new divots or holes or anything like that. All right so I can get a nice straight cut and I can sand it down if I want to. So this just gives me a ton of additional options right so there I'm just doing some quick sanding just to get rid of any roughness to my cut and boom we've got a nice smooth line. If you're still not getting it perfectly smooth you can always take just a small amount of putty or something like that and uh and you can just wet that out and work it around the side. So if you want to get a really perfect edge that's all you got to do. They'll take a little extra putty then it's time to clean up the straight line at the edge and we're good to go. Same thing on the little base just give it a little trim and give it a little sand if I want and uh and there you go. Again as with the case a lot of times you don't need to actually get into the sanding most time it's it'll be perfectly good enough with just your your knife as long as you take a nice smooth cut out of it. I end up working this a few times sanding it a few times just to make sure it's where it's where I uh I want to be. Now the next thing I want to do when I'm thinking about a sewer is I don't just want the sewer to drop off into the water. When I think of how people would construct this sort of I don't know this sort of structure uh I I think about the fact that there would be some kind of break point some kind of extra construction that would show the line between the place where someone's supposed to walk and the edge of the water there would be like a break. So I'm going to use these little tiny bricks um I ordered a whole bunch of these from Michigan Toy Soldier great place to get all your your modeling stuff from they're not sponsor anything I just really like their store and I think they're nice people who ship things very well and have a great selection uh and so I'm just putting a little super glue along and making myself a little line of bricks right across there and what that gives me is just it breaks up the two sections of the base with a nice little visual cue. I'll do it on the little one as well uh and I really love how this looks I think it just gives you the feel once we add the water later that there's absolutely a dividing line between these two sections it just feels more natural uh now I'm going to go ahead and you know stick the bricks to my fingers like a genius so once that's all in there and I've got that space lined out it really helps me create a separation but something does have to stand on the space and because I chose to just do half of it as this and half of it as water I need something out in the middle of the area where I can then put like the other leg of a fig or whatever if that's what I'm trying to do right so uh I'm going to make myself a little island and again I'm going to use the same bricks you see I'm just laid down some glue and I'm just going to drop them into place using some tweezers now I won't stop with just these bricks and my thought pattern here was this is probably some little area out in the middle of the water that's raised up for some reason or another could be any any reason why that's happening but I'll also put some mud around it later which you'll see as we keep going forward but things like this again when you're dealing with sewers and it's so much just a thing that you're imagining it's really all about creating an image of something that feels realistic or feels imaginative most sewers in the world like there there are some very crazy sewer systems in the world but even then they're not fantasy level sewers that are like that are uh as I said earlier you know unbelievably tall or huge or full of uh secret dungeons what I'm doing here is is a little interesting trick playing with the edge of the universe so I created a tiny little raised cork thing that I'll put mud around later and I'm just going to slice it flat so it's a little more of like a looks like more of just the side of a wall and then once I have this little outcropping cut flat what I'm going to do is I'm going to put a pipe on top so let's talk about how you make sewer pipes one of the easiest ways to make sewer pipes are these little plastic tips that come on your paint brushes whenever you buy paint brushes you often get these little plastic tips on them by the way you get even if you buy cheap bulk paint brushes like as I often do just cheap synthetics and a big pack uh you'll usually get these little plastic tips on them I always save them because they're just infinitely useful as pipes I use these all the time in in bases and dioramas so I cut the pipe to the exact angle of the edge of the base or the little you know sole plastic piece and then I glued it to the top of that so it'll give me the chance if I want later to have some some goo streaming down into the lake or look like this is a an access tunnel or something that that you know dumps into this uh cistern or whatever now I'm going to take the same exact uh a different one but I'm going to take you know another little little brush tip protector and I'm going to cut it directly in half and when it's in half I'm going to make myself a little pipe that's halfway submerged in the water so I kind of just slide it over there and glue it down and now I'll have a half submerged pipe uh pretty cool trick overall I really like messing around with like pipes and sewers and stuff like that because you can just kind of go nuts uh if you've got old chain or chains like discarded jewelry chain or a lot of miniature kits come with extra chains or things like that sure just take some of those and throw them on the base take some skulls throw them on the base take uh some rats from your scaven kits throw them on the base all that stuff is possible now what I'm going to do is I want to add a little texture it wouldn't all be just the sewers down here it makes sense that there would also be other sorts of textures going on probably like areas where mud has gathered because storms you know at some point there was a big storm and the sewage overflowed its normal bounds and got up there and then left behind some gross dirt or something like that right so I'm just taking some Vallejo thick mud way to work right on camera vents that's uh that's a plus work right there and uh I'm just spreading it around uh and I'm just going to put it in all of these areas that are around the bricks and around stuff like where there could be areas of mud you can go nuts here you can put it on top of your previous work you can put it around things like you could have some around the pipe where maybe there's a build-up if you have areas of the brick that are kind of um not as well defined like if your roller kind of skipped a beat there and you didn't quite get it as flat as you wanted hey throw a little dirt on top bought a boom problem solved right so now I have all that mud all laid out you can also texture this you can put a little rocks or grit or anything like that around so the key is just to be imaginative and and think of anything like that you want here I've got a little glue I'm going to do just that I'm going to take a little little this is a pva glue and water mixture I'm going to kind of spread that around and uh in a in a couple places I find interesting that'll also make a nice mortar by the way when you lay down the bricks this like water pva glue mixture is a great mortar if you're doing these bricks individually so uh then I'm just going to take some little rocks and just kind of throw them on here and just go nuts uh this will give me some other interesting texture on this area of the base just some more fun stuff to break up the base and that's the key the more little things we have the more interesting this becomes alright so everything is dry and I went ahead and primed the the base gave it a little sort of zenithal type little grise cover of just black and white and you notice that I kept my white at an angle when you're dealing with flat bases like this you always want there to be an angle you're operating from okay because the more you uh are playing with that individual angle uh the more interesting the lighting scheme is going to become so now what I'm doing is something that I would not recommend you do but I did because I'm dumb uh so what I am doing is I am painting back in all the mud now let me talk about how I should have done this what I should have done was after I did the black I should have done just a coat of brown the same sort of mahogany brown and black that I'm currently painting in all these thin lines in I should have done that over everything then I should have come in at my deep angle and done the white because most of these recesses stay dark so all I would have needed to do then is pick out the little tiny areas that didn't get properly or that accidentally got a little too covered instead I forgot to do that and so I had to go back in and do it afterward that took a long time on 300 bases but learn from my mistakes and do things the right way uh the reason that I'm painting those back in is because contrast is king whenever you're dealing with sewers or anything that's going to be cobblestones you want that area in between to be nice and dark now what I'm going to do is a little wet blend over the remaining cobblestones and I chose some interesting colors for this and I'll explain why I've got some ice yellow some deck tan some mahogany and then I use a little bit of that the darkest like my uh pain's gray blue black ink okay you notice my brush is at an absolutely almost horizontal angle here to this thing that way when I'm moving I'm only hitting the raised areas okay now I'm going to start with that ice yellow and then slowly integrate that deck tan which is like a sort of nice I don't know kind of mid-range gray warm color it's hard to explain it's it's a very popular color I love it it's a great nice mid-gray so I use it all the time then I'm going to take that mahogany I'm going to work it in from the other side again only hitting the bricks and hit the bricks uh and then I'm going to wet blend all of this together right so I'm just you notice how fat like I understand this is sped up but I'm working very fast across this large space using fairly thick paint spreading it out working it together and that gives me this wonderful gradient from bright yellow to red as though there's like a bright thing out in the water that's casting light if I messed anything up I just go in and clean it up real fast yeah see again things I would have saved myself pain by uh doing properly to begin with but I didn't uh but that contrast you can see how well those stones stand out even the darker stones when they're against that dark brown black mud okay contrast is the is king with cobblestones now the reason I pick yellow to red is very simple in the end the entire base is going to glow green okay everything's going to have a green tint to it so why did I pick yellow and red because the green is going to be a somewhat soft osl effect and so to make that really pop yellow has this very high luminosity and the yellow under the green I'm going to use will make it have a sort of sickly poisoned glow when green hits red okay it becomes brown and darker and becomes a shadow color so with this gradient of yellow to gray to red I'm actually creating an under shade for what's going to eventually be my green color all right and you'll see how that looks when you get to some later steps so what I'm focused on here I'm just wet blending out those bricks out in the middle of the water um I'll end up blacklining those at some point as well yep there we go because again contrast still key you want those little bricks to stand out from each other I'm also painting the mud that's around the uh around everything here all that mud nice dark brown black color same as my mud up top uh making sure that's like that because this is more mud I just took a little lighter brown and like you know did a quick dry brush over the top does need to be anything special most of that is going to end up submerged under a resin pour so it just needs to look like submerged mud you don't need to really worry about it too much okay all right so now it's time to actually turn the water green we're not going to use this on the rocks just yet the reason I'm doing this is because that's where my resin pour is going to be but I don't want to do that uh until I've actually colored the base I'm using some green skin flesh here you do not want to do a colored resin pour over your standard zenithal that's a quick way to make the water look really really shallow and ugly you want all these different levels of under shading to show through so I lay down a nice green and then I'm going to create some deeper shadows where it looks like basically in this case I'm going to spray near the near the yeah exactly near the edge so it makes it look like uh there's something casting a shadow there and again there's this glow out in the water if you're doing the ocean you want it to be brighter near the shore or near the edge and deeper darker near the deeper part but here because I want there to be this alien glow out in the sewers hence it's uh we're going that direction instead okay so now I'm going to take my uh my green color my green skin flesh and mix it with a whole lot of fluorescent this is the fluorescent ink from green stuff world and I make myself a real nice thin mixture and I'm going to spray it real thin at this angle you see me just doing a lot of passes okay I'm starting to just tint that green right and I'm going to do the same thing out on the little bricks and the wonderful part here is it's it's not going to hurt the anything else this green is so weak it basically won't affect the the um the dark brown at all and but you see how once that's put over there and try right I oh by the way I blew a little too much that was me just sopping up a little puddle sometimes that can happen with your airbrush no issue just grab a brush sop up your extra you're good to go okay once I've got my nice green tint on the rocks and again I didn't want it to be overpowering just to give a nice feel of something alien I still want the water to be the most green all right so speaking of water let's get ourselves ready for that uh I painted all the metallics off camera those were just me laying down some metallics and that's one of the important things is you need to do everything else before you do them you do the resin pour should always be your last step now I'm going to make moss I might do a whole video on this later just on doing moss but I lay down some super glue and then I grab some tiny little green flock like you used to make model train tables and I'm just going to spread it around in that super glue some thin super glue is generally going to serve you the best here so if you've got like a super glue thin you see a glue thin or something that's going to be your best so I lay that down and then I'm just going to dump that all out I didn't want to dump it on my desk because it's impossible to get rid of so I dumped in the trash and you can see how now tada look at that there's little bits of clumpy moss left as always though we're not going to let it just be like that of course of course not we have to also paint it so I have to let all that super glue dry because I don't want to get paint on something wet we're back that's dry now this didn't take that long and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to put some paint into that moss I start with some agrax earth shade and I'm just going to go ahead and dip that into some of the areas that are more recessed or that I want to be darker when it first goes in there it's going to be pretty dark you can thin it if you want a more subtle effect you know just mix a little water in it will stop down in there and this stuff will drink that wash right up okay so you can easily tint this stuff in a lot of different colors by playing with the the different washes it actually looks really cool when you put a little bit of like the um red wash in it now I'm taking a little fluorescent green from uh war colors and I'm just spreading it around on the edge of the moss to make it look like there's some bioluminescence to it right so this is actually moss that's kind of glowing underwater now once everything dries here it's all going to pull together a little bit the green doesn't dry quite this bright as it's showing on camera and the dark doesn't dry quite as dark right so I am going to let all of that dry and then I'm going to do my resin pour uh I'm not going to do that part on camera because or actually I do think I do on camera sorry I'm a liar um the I want to talk about though what I got myself ready for so you'll notice that there's this little edge around my base and that is blue tack what I just showed you on camera was the green stuff world silicon molds they're okay I will say they don't generally work with GW bases because those have a slight trapezoidal shape to them these are MDF bases they can work but I didn't have one big enough they're okay they will leak some this way I found to be much better so I take new strips of blue tack and I just work it around the edge of the base and then tuck it underneath and make sure it's nice and stuck then I take my realistic water I mix it with that green skin flesh some green ink and some of that fluorescent and a little bit of yellow ink and I make a big sickly green liquid measure look at that look how gross and wonderful that looks oh it's fantastic I was really happy with this mix I didn't have any particular ratio I just kept mixing it all until I loved what it looked like then I'm going to take a little pipette and I'm just going to slowly start working this is at two time speed remember this is how slow I'm moving around this thing slowly work my way around I try to get a nice smooth drink of it from the from the thing and then slowly work my way in and the reason I'm working so slow not blowing it all out and the reason I'm being so careful about drawing it up is because then I don't get bubbles everywhere bubbles are the enemy when you're doing resin cores so I just kind of work it you notice I never go all the way to the edge instead I mostly let the just natural capillary action the spread of this stuff slowly flatten out I also put a little bit in that pipe just to look like there's a little bit in there and if there are a couple bubbles as there always will be I just take my exacto and I pop the little bubbles so with that that base is basically ready to go it just needs to dry the only other thing I'm going to add and this is a completely optional step is some bubbles because who doesn't love who doesn't love intentional bubbles and this is what's so funny about this process you pop your fake bubbles the ones that are like the ones that happen or sorry you pop your real bubbles I apologize the ones that happen naturally because they will cause the resin to cure in a bad way and then they'll break and you'll just have this big hole this big void in your pore but it is cool to have real bubbles in there so for that I grabbed a silica packet these often come in things that are shipped to you things you buy where you can just get little silica packets and I just drop a couple little round silica balls in there the resin will cure around them they're clear so they'll take on the color and suddenly you have real in scale perfectly believable bubbles so now it's just a matter of letting that all dry and you'll see some pictures here at the end but as always thank you very much for watching this I hope this was cool I hope you enjoy the pictures I did do a whole bunch of these give it a like if you like it subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future if you've got any questions drop those down below but as always I thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time