54mm Cimmerian King (aka Conan) base

Figure on rock base

The shed life continued this week but by Sunday morning I had finished the large outside bench (3.6m x 0.6m) attached to the back wall and also painted up and finished my new mobile shed bench.  Now finally back to painting (and making foam weapons for the kids).

On the figure I undercoated all the components.  I did a little presiding on the banner too.

Nope, just doesn't look right

With the rock that I want to use it is 7cm at its widest.  My normal wooden lounge leg that I use as a base is too small so I found I had a nice piece of 7x7cm pine in the shed (no idea what it was originally purchased for).  So I cut a 5cm long chunk and tried that out as a base.  The wood looks fine, but the rock (in order to fit) is off centre, and thus the figure is off centre.  Not what you want for a single figure.  After trying a few options I decided that perhaps a round base would be better.  Rather than find a large chair leg to cut down I tried to make one out of resin.

Mould and new base size

Finding a nice sized circle from the inside of a masking tape roll I then used the same tape roll as the resin mould.  I covered the inside with PVA glue and then hot glued the roll to some foam card.  In order to save resin I put a piece of wood at the bottom which was 2/3 the height of the base.  I also put some nails in the wood so the resin would have some good attachment points.

New base

The resin (I use Easycast brand) bubbled a bit probably because the PVA glue wasn’t fully dry.  Or I mixed it too long?  Either way I had a lot of little bubbles in the side of the base.  I sanded down the outside (starting at 180 grit and ending at 400) but as I sanded more bubbles would be exposed and result in pock marks.  To get a smooth finished I used wood putty (watered down so runny) and filled in all the small holes this way.  I finished off with more sanding switching to wet and dry and going up to 800 grit.

Wood bottom to save on resin

Next thing to do is trim down the rock a little to fit better.  But now the figure is in the centre of the base and having no straight edges means the hard edges of the rock are easier to work with.  On the square base I found that it was hard not to have one rock edge parallel with the base edge which doesn’t look very good.

Much better