Endor bases

I decided early on that if I was to go imperial forces, I’d want to have the bases themed around Endor. So I looked up a few images if the California redwood forests to get some references.

Photo by Allie Caulfield https://www.flickr.com/photos/28577026@N02/6845261959

The photo above really shows the colours I was interested in including: a variety of greens for live vegetation and the red/orange/brown of the dried needles littered all over the ground.

For the greenery I was well equipped, with a variety of flocks at my disposal, but I had nothing for the needles, so I decided to experiment.

In Western Australia we have a very abundant variety of eucalyptus called Jarrah which has a fairly distinctive red wood. I wondered if sawdust from this wood would be suitable for what I was after. The wood is used a lot on construction and furniture making here and I have offcuts on hand ready to sacrifice for a good cause.

On went the dust mask (don’t breathe this in is good advice for any sanding) and out came the sander. The sander has a handy collection box at the back which made getting enough sawdust quick.

The result is this very fine power which is bang on colour wise I think. And there’s plenty more where that came from (if you live around here).

Onto basing!

I started the bases with a textured paint I made from Vallejo White Ground Texture and a mix of inks, ratio of roughly one of the palette divet’s worth of texture, to 6 drops black ink, 6 drops red ink, 6 drops green ink, and 2 drops yellow ink.

I pressed down some sticks while the paste was still wet

I covered all of the base in watered down mod podge, then successively sprinkled small slate, Woodland Scenics light green coarse turf, darker green medium turf (no idea who makes it, had it for years), Woodland Scenics burnt grass fine turf, Woodland Scenics green grass fine turf and finally an all over coating of the jarrah sawdust

And here’s the good camera photo after a coat of Mig matt varnish.

I don’t always varnish my models, but I wanted to anchor down the relatively lightly glued down basing materials. Unfortunately it darkened down the sawdust quite a bit so it lost some of its red effect. On the models where more sawdust got added it retained quite a bit of the red however so that’s a lesson learned, more is better in this case!

Overall I’m very happy with how these bases turned out, I think they managed to look pretty natural and the effect is close to what I was chasing.