Colors and Bases

Not much actual progress today. I tried some more colors for freehand on the djinn's pants:

Grey, a couple of browns (they look yellow) a couple light blues, and then the same dark blue I plan to use as the shadow color. I think that's probably the one I'll go with. That does mean that the pattern will not be visible in the shadow areas...but I think that might be OK. It's supposed to be subtle-ish, so maybe having it blend in to the shadows will be a good thing. 

Another thing I tried was doing the pattern with thicker lines in a dark color, then a light blue inside the wide lines. Some times, the dark 'outline' helps. Not this time.

Now, yesterday I said I'd talk about basing options for the two new minis. Let's take a look.

With her, I figure I will probably put some static grass or rocks or such on the base. However, working that stuff around her feet, swords, and the cape might be kinda tricky. Also, when I put her on the base, I made the mistake of having the little rough spot left from where the base attached to a sprue on the front. You can see it right by her right foot. Now, I could pull her off the base and put her on a different one, but in that case I still have to worry about getting the basing material around the model. I could pull her off the base, put stuff on it, then put her back. For that, I have to consider getting her off the base without damaging the mini. Then I have to worry about how to hold her while she's being painted. Usually, I put the base on a film canister and use poster tack to hold it on. No base, well, that'll be harder. So, at the moment, I've put some liquid green stuff over the rough spot to smooth it out, and I'm planning on taking my chances with putting basing material on under her. Hmm. I could also put her on a cork base...I'll have to think about that. Her pose is so action-y it'd almost be a shame to not have her base also showing she's in the middle of a fight.

Showing what she's fighting with would be better, but now we're in to diorama territory, and I'd have to give that rather more thought. But maybe tomorrow I'll consider my primed critters and baddies and see if anything jumps out at me.

And, the bar matron:

She's on a standard Reaper 'broccoli' base. There's nothing wrong with those, but I'd rather see her on a nice wood floor or something. She is probably not carrying those pints across a mossy field, after all. That means cutting her off the broccoli base. I think this is doable. There's a gap between the bottom of her skirts and the base, and I can get a saw in there to cut her off. Then, when I put pins in  to attach her to the new base, I can maintain the little bit of gap. We'll see how it goes. For the base itself, I have a sheet of balsa with grooves cut in it that will do for planks. If I carefully use a knife to make cross cuts to represent the ends of boards, hopefully it will be a passable wood floor. It won't have as rough a texture as some I've seen, and it might be too regular to look right. But I'll give it a try. The upside is that since it's actually wood, if I wanted to I could actually stain the stuff instead of painting it to look like wood.