Armour Modelling

The Basics of Bases

You do not have to put your finished model on a base, though if you want to put any figures beside your tank some kind of base is essential. But one is not needed if all you have is the tank itself and limited space to display it.

Having said that, what kinds of base can you get? The first, and simplest, is a shaped piece of wood. You can get these from many places, and in various sizes. They range from polished mahogany with a carved border to a simple plinth in ‘ordinary’ wood. You can also just buy a plain piece of wood from a timber merchant’s off cut bin and varnish it yourself.

Commercial bases are also available. These come in many varieties, sizes and prices from many makers. They can be cast in resin or ceramic (plaster), or moulded from expanded polystyrene with a hard skin. They range from simple ‘countryside’ scenes, to which you add your own grass and other scenery, to complete kits with streets and buildings.

The more complicated bases are those made from scratch. The bottom layer can be a wood or chipboard base with your own addition of ‘groundwork’ (a very literal term meaning you build up a landscape from the bare earth) on top of it. I won’t go here into the methods for constructing one like that, instead I’ll concentrate on the ‘kit’ type.

A simple countryside base
This one is a straightforward base in moulded expanded polystyrene with a hard skin. It comes with simple groundwork moulded onto it, in this case hollows and rises, a ditch, a few stones, some logs and some tank tracks, but you have to add grass or other vegetation yourself. Mine had some holes where the cooling resin produced bubbles that broke the surface, but these were easily fixed with model filler. You could paint this as desert sand and stones, but the desert doesn’t have trees so you’d need to cut away the logs for that. I made mine with vegetation typical of uncultivated land in north-west Europe.

The first step is to paint the basic colours on the ground surface. This is best done with enamels, which have a longer drying time than acrylic paints and let you use a ‘wet on wet’ technique. This means putting one colour on a small part of the base and then adding another to it immediately so the two blend together at their meeting point, then painting the next small section and so on. Here you need several earth browns, a medium tone for the base coat with a darker one for the hollows and a paler one on the high points. You can paint the logs as old, weathered grey wood.

The addition of some grass and bushes will make it look much more interesting. Woodland Scenics, available from any good model railway shop, have a range of different-coloured grasses sold in packs of strands about 70mm long, which you cut to whatever length you want for your grass. Several makers offer ‘grass mats’, which are mats of short grass-like leaves bonded onto a brown paper backing. Those are fine if you want to only have short grass all the same colour. To get the variation that is seen in real grass you need to find several grass mats in different colours, cut irregular shapes from them to stick onto your base, and vary the height of the grass they provide by cutting some of it shorter with scissors.

Woodland Scenics’ Fine-Leaf Foliage is a dried natural product that gives a very realistic effect of leaves on branches. They have several colours of this, and all you need to do is pull pieces apart to suit the effect you want. Although intended for OO and HO scale railways it works very well as small bushes and short, young tree saplings. Their Underbrush Clump-Foliage, also available in several colours, is very useful to make small, densely leaved plant clumps. All can be glued in place with Woodland Scenics’ Scenic Glue, which dries to a clear matt finish. Since it dries matt it won’t help if you want puddles of rainwater on your base, for which you need their Water Effects, a special heavier version of white glue that dries glossy and can even be built up in layers to make small streams.

Add this vegetation to your base by making holes with a drill bit – your fingers can push a bit through the surface hardening of this kind of base, but you’ll need to use your pin vice or minidrill for resin or ceramic bases. These will take the bottoms of your saplings, and more holes can take some ‘long grass’ representing the tall weeds that appear in places on uncultivated ground. The Clump-Foliage will make dense low growth here and there.

So far so good, but the effect is still of a painted base with some foliage added to it. Silflor makes some excellent Grass Tufts as well as a different grass mat. This is not on a paper backing sheet so can be pulled into whatever shape you want and stuck down on a base painted in earth colours to look as real as the grass in your garden with the earth showing through it. The double-thickness type makes a quite convincing layer of heather-type growth.

Place all these randomly, leaving bare paths between them where animals and people might walk, and add tufts and long grass by the logs and the low growth, too. My base was laid out to reproduce the general look of real uncultivated land near my home in Sussex, which it has done quite successfully. The final job is to paint a gloss black edge round the base.

Remember that the bottoms of ditches, like the banks of stream, are damper than the higher ground, so tend to have lusher, longer vegetation with brighter foliage. Long grass and tall weeds are often found along walls, fences and hedges. Shaded areas under large trees will have sparser growth. Low-growing shrubs, like heather, tend to spread and tangle together in the wild with bare ground under them.

The Woodland Scenics items I used can be found in a good model railway shop; there are other makers too. The Silflor is harder to find, but again there are other makers. I’ve included in the ‘Reference’ chapter a good mail-order stockist that has a wide selection of makes.

Building a townscape base from a kit
Now let’s look at a street scene kit from Verlinden, with my thanks to Historex Agents for providing it. Here we have a cobbled road corner with a badly damaged building. Although intended for the 1942 to 1945 period because it includes the steel packing tube for a 75mm German anti-tank gun shell, it can easily be adapted for an earlier setting by covering or disguising that part.

The building is in three sections with a separate low set of steps up to its entrance. It is made in resin but you need no special tools to work with this set, only different glue. There is some ‘flash’ – a thin skin of resin – in the door and window openings but you only need your knife blade to remove this. The base and parts have been cast in one-piece moulds so have smooth, undetailed backs and the only problem is that the base’s resin has shrunk so that its bottom is thinner than its edges, which make a ridge around it. Clear away any shavings, dust or little bits of resin and wash your hands when you finish working on the model in the same way that you tidy up and wash when working with plastic. Sanding a base this size to an even level is anyway rather hard to do - most people end up with a surface that is either domed in the middle or thinner at some edges than others, so it wobbles or has a slant instead of sitting flat and level. Instead, go to a furnishing or craft shop and buy some of the thick self-adhesive pads made to stick under ornaments so they don’t scratch polished wooden surfaces. Stick one under each corner of the base, then stick more on top of each one until it sits flat.

Building the building
Next, stick the building sections together. Use a two-part adhesive like Araldite for this as it has the strength you need for such large parts and dries slowly enough to let you adjust them so the lines of bricks meet at the same level around their corners. It also helps to fill any gaps! Squeeze equal amounts from the two tubes it comes in onto a piece of kitchen foil and mix them thoroughly. Then put the adhesive onto one joining surface and press the parts together. They will usually need five minutes for it to set. Test the sections against their locations on the base to make sure they are at the correct angle. Then mix more adhesive and attach the third section. Use your knife to pare off any adhesive that has squeezed out of the joints, after they are solid but before the glue has hardened completely.

The building edges may not meet evenly and the assembled building may not sit evenly on its location on the base. This is due to resin shrinkage, which can happen with large parts if they are cast in open-topped moulds. No problem, all you need to do is use two-part epoxy putty to fill any gaps. Take small pieces of each ‘part’ and roll them between your fingers into equal balls – it is important that both ‘parts’ are the same quantity when you mix them, so add a bit to the smaller ball if necessary. When your amounts are as near to equal as you can make them, roll the balls together into a long sausage. Double it over and repeat as many times as needed until the two colours have blended completely. Now it’s ready to use.

Use your knife to press some into the gaps, making sure you keep the angled edge between the sections angled rather than flattened. It doesn’t matter if there’s more than you need in any place, you can cut off the surplus with your knife while it dries, which takes quite a long time. Remember to clean your knife when you finish, so the putty doesn’t dry on it. When the building is rigid you can check how it sits on the base. If it isn’t a good fit to the wall foundations just mix some more epoxy putty and make three sausages to run along the outer edges of the foundations. Press the building down onto them so it sits level, letting the putty squeeze out, and then do the same for the inner edges of the foundations. Cut away the excess putty level with the edges of the bricks. Now you have a good, solid building that sits properly on its foundations. You can still lift it off, which makes it much easier to do the painting, and you can decide whether to fix it permanently or leave it detachable so that storage is easier.

It’s much easier to fix the steps when the building is complete and level on its foundations. You can attach them to the base or to the building and fill any gaps with epoxy putty. And while you have the putty by you, squeeze a bit as flat as you can and put it over that packing tube I mentioned earlier, on the left side of the roadway near the edge, to look like a bit of discarded blanket or a curtain blown out of a window.

Painting
Begin with white on the inside of the building, including the openings for the windows and door – I used Citadel’s Skull White spray can. Next are base coats of any brick red you like on all the brickwork, including the foundations and fallen bricks on the base, and medium grey on the roadway and pavement areas. These are not just undercoats, you’ll leave a lot of them showing, so make them cover properly.

Now pick out various bricks with different ‘brick red’ colours. Those can range from a dark red-brown to a quite orange shade, as many colours as you like, the important thing being to make sure that only a few bricks ever get the same colour next to each other. Cobblestones also come in a wide variety of colours, but you’ll be putting a wash over them later so you can choose between picking them out in various shades of grey or simply dry-brushing their tops in a lighter grey.

Now you need to colour the stonework around the windows and door and the decorative line of stone around the building. I used a pale buff, common as the colour of stone for this kind of work, but you can opt for grey or even for white if you want to show it as painted. If you do decide to have it white you will need to pick out the damaged areas as the buff or grey of unpainted stone. Don’t forget to paint the steps as well. Next is the darker buff of mortar, visible on the broken ends and top of the walls, with some brick red showing too. Use all these colours on the fallen brickwork too. Fallen bricks usually have some mortar left at an end or the top or bottom – you can vary how you show this, but most should have the buff colour on at least one surface. The buff of mortar dust should also go on the base itself where its texture shows as rough and dusty.

Creating a damaged interior
The inside of the building needs attention as well. A grand piano has fallen into the basement, but there are no floors for it to fall through so you will have to make your own ‘broken floors’. Go to a craft shop, or any shop with a children’s craft area, and look for the packs of wood aimed at youngsters. You should find both ‘matchsticks’ and ‘lollipop sticks’ and they are all you need. If a good hobby shop is nearer you can look there for packs of assorted balsa wood. Either way what you want are bits of wood that you can use for floorboards, the joists that they rest on, and window and doorframes. You will also need carpenters’ white glue.

Start with the joists. Work out where the floors should be in your building and stick together bundles of ‘matchsticks’ to make the thicker timbers of the joists (if you’re using balsa wood you want lengths about 10mm square). They won’t be intact in a wrecked building, so line some of the joist sections that you make up on the insides of the walls with gaps between them and have others butted together to make longer ‘remnants’ – you’ll cover the joints later so they won’t show. Don’t forget to have some running across the building as well as along its walls. Now come the floorboards, made with the ‘lollipop sticks’. Use your saw to cut some at an angle to fit against the walls, and then break off the other ends – you want a broken appearance, not a saw-cut end. Glue them onto the joists with some next to each other and the rest as single remaining boards, making sure you cover any joints where your pieces of joist meet. Use masking tape to give a straight line between the joist sections and paint the exposed brickwork where the broken parts have fallen away, using several colours like the outside bricks. Paint some thin buff lines of mortar between the individual bricks too. A thin wash of a darkish brown on the tops and bottoms of the floorboards will bring out the grain of the wood to make them look better, but their broken ends must stay unpainted. The joists can either be given the same wash or, like mine, painted – if there was no ceiling the exposed beams and joists were often painted either brown or black.

Final touches
One thing always seen in real life, but not included in most kits, is the framing in window and door openings. This is the surviving end of a building that has been on the fringe of an explosion, so it is obvious from the rest of the damage to it that a lot of this framing would have gone too. Adding some broken bits is quite straightforward. Take some ‘matchsticks’ and carefully saw along the tops of them to make the groove where the glass used to be, then snap them into pieces and glue them at random into the window openings. The bits of doorframe are ‘matchsticks’ without this groove. To make it look even more realistic, find some clear plastic – save the flat bits of bubble packs for this kind of thing - cut it into jagged shapes, and then glue them into the grooves. Finally, paint the frames in whatever colour you fancy.

Now you need to paint that piano and the other assorted bits of debris on the base. Choose whatever colours you like for things like the ‘old blanket’ we’ve added, the oil drum, the oilcan and the bottles, but remember that most pianos were either gloss black or highly polished bare wood. The accordion in front of the door could be almost any gloss colour. There’s a rifle among the bits and pieces, and several empty shell cases, so paint them too. The last job is to add a dusty wash over the whole base and the building. Make a large batch, adding buff and grey paint to your thinner – the result of bombing or shellfire was plenty of mortar dust, so you need to aim for a dusty grey-buff shade. You can vary the wash while you apply it by adding more buff or grey.

Last, paint the edges of the base. Black is the usual choice, but you can have any colour you like. With that done you can add the building, put a tank on the base, and admire your work!