Would you like to give a special touch to your Tau army? In that case you will like this tutorial, we will see how to create custom bases for the Tau army of the Warhammer 40,000 wargame.

Lets Start!

Materials

To create these custom bases for T’au, we will use the GreenStuffWorld Tau textured roller. Also, if we want to cut them in a circular way,we will need the circular base cutters. The silicone guide rings can help us too, but in this particular tutorial they have not been necessary.

In addition, we will use a mixture of Milliput and standard clay.

Mixing materials

We will start by mixing 50-50 the milliput with the clay, (we will use the same amount of milliput and clay).

Why are we doing this? Firstly to spend less Milliput,since the clay is something cheaper, and on the other hand, because by adding some clay the textured roll will stick less to the mixture.

Textured rolling pin

Once we have the mixture (take your time to become a homogeneous mass), we will flatten this mixture. To do this, we can even use the container in which the textured rolling pin comes. It is important that if we use this container, we have the roller pin inside so that it has the proper consistency.

After that, we will apply petroleum jelly or lipstick over the entire flattened surface. We will do this so that in the next step when we pass the textured roller, the mass does not adhere to the roller.

Once we pass the roller slowly, the result will be the following:

It is possible that even if you have applied petroleum jelly or lipstick, some bits could stick to the roller. A trick to remove these leftovers easily is to use blutack to remove them.

Circular cuts

If we want circular bases, we will use the circular cutters from GSW, choosing the measure that corresponds to our base:

We will cut them easily using those tools and with the help of a spatula we take off the bases from our working table:

Irregular bases – Rock bases

Another way is to create some irregular stones or rocks,rather than circular ones. Those are my favorite ones. To do this, we will just pass the textured rolling pin and we will let the putty dry. Here are some examples:

Once the putty is dry, we will break different bits depending on the size we want. The idea is to put them over cork pieces.

Using a modeling blade,we will adapt these bits to the cork.

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To finish with the creation of these bases, we will fill with some kind of putty the space between the cork and the milliput pieces. In this case I have used Desert Sand but you can use any putty or even sand directly using PVA glue. Here you can see the result after applying the sand:

Here we would have the final result.

As you’ll see in the next tutorial, I’ll explain how to paint them step by step and how well they look on circular bases: