Hobby: Making tiled floor bases

Following on from my last post on Sim29, I thought I'd do a simple tutorial on making tiled floor bases which is what I've done on my McMourning crew.

I've refined the lab base technique I originally trialled with the original McMourning who now really looks like he needs rebasing in comparison to Sim29 and Miss Pack (which I've now done, see below).  The technique is very simple to do and looks pretty good I think.  Here's how I did it.

1-  Fill in the slot in the base with GS, Milliput or whatever.  You're going to be applying pressure to this later, so you don't want to be pushing your green stuff through the slot.  Let this dry before moving on to the next stage:

2 - Cover the base in green stuff.  I think I used Milliput on my original McMourning, but that doesn't work nearly as well as GS.

3- Smooth out the green stuff with your preferred sculpting tool to roughly spread it over the base:

4- Use something smooth and cylindrical (thank you, titter ye not) to roll the GS flat, even and smooth on the base.  I use the plastic tube that my green stuff comes in.  It'll end up nice and smooth like this:

5- Smooth out any bit where there are fingerprints showing or it's a bit uneven.  If necessary, roll it out again.  I don't get too hung up over slight imperfections here, as I figure that McMourning's lab floor is pretty far from perfect.

6- Score lines over the GS in your preferred tile pattern.  I use a fairly blunt hobby knife to do it with.  I usually start with a cross in the middle like this:

This cross then guides the rest of the lines.  Try and push down with this rather than dragging as you don't want to be moving the GS about on the base.  You could use a ruler or something to get straight lines, but I just do it by eye.  You should end up with something like this:

You might end up with the odd wonky line or slight bend (I've got a couple here), so just run up and down any lines again taking care to press rather than drag where possible.

7- Leave to dry then mount the model on it.  Ideally you'll want to pin it to the base.

Here's a finished example, minus the miniature:

As I'd made this, I decided I might as well rebase McMourning with it, so here he is:

There's a Flesh Construct still to come to finish off this McMourning specific part of the crew.