Urban-style bases fit perfectly with many armies, including Custodes and gangs from Necromunda. Take a look at the 8 simple steps to painting city fight bases quickly using a limited range of colors.
Painting up a mass amount of bases can be daunting, but can easily be done with various steps. This can be done with either an airbrush or using rattlecan primer and dry brushing. This video tutorial was inspired by Hellfire Painting and their work with urban bases.
Step 1 – Primer!
Test the base prior to spraying to be sure the model will fit on the base. Then spray with black primer.
Step 2 – Light Spray
Lightly spray the base with grey spray. This can be done with an airbrush or a rattle-can grey but needs to be done lightly. You do not need to use the airbrush for this step, however, and works better if you use a rattlecan when doing a lot of bases at once.
Step 3 – Weathering
Using brown paint, such as Rhinox Hide from Games Workshop, apply in random places lightly over the base. You can do this via airbrush or drybrush. Start light and work your way out with varying intensity. While this tutorial is applying this step via airbrush, you can use a dry brush or thin layers of paint to apply this step.
Step 4 – Highlighting
Once the base layers of brown are completed, use a lighter brown, such as Skrag Brown by Games Workshop, to highlight the original brown but also add browns to new areas as well. While this tutorial is applying this step via airbrush, you can use a dry brush or thin layers of paint to apply this step.
Step 5 – Blending
Using a dry brush and a light grey, such as Celestra Grey by Games Workshop, liberally drybrush across everything on the base. This will fade down the browns and help blend everything together as well as apply the first layer of highlights.
Step 6 – Highlighting
Next step is to highlight everything up higher using a very light grey, such as Ulthuan Grey from Games Workshop. This is applied by dry brush again but applied in more strategic areas. This grey should hit areas where a light would hit more and edges of raised areas.
Step 7 – Finish
Once everything is done, time to edge the base with black! You can use any high-pigmented black paint, such as Vallejo Surface Primer Black. Apply this using a wet brush so there are no brush streaks.
Step 8 – Final Details
If the base has any other details, skulls, tufts, etc, that are desired, this is when those would be applied and completed. You can do this prior to the previous step as well.
There you have it, 6-8 easy steps to painting up a lot of urban bases quickly. These steps can be combined together. While this tutorial used an airbrush to apply the brown rust effects, you can easily apply that via brush as well. Be sure to check out Hellfire Painting’s other awesome articles and press play on the video below to see the entire process in action!
About the Author: Drago
