Texture Paste and Basing Materials for Miniatures

Hey again, friends. I'm going to let you in on a confession. I've spent an embarrassing amount of money on basing materials over the years. Texture paints, specialty pastes, pre-made tufts, scenic snow, realistic water, cork sheets, resin rocks, laser-cut wooden planks. My basing supplies drawer looks like a craft store exploded in a tiny space. And you know what? Some of the best bases I've ever made used dirt. Actual dirt. From outside. Free dirt.

That's the beautiful thing about basing materials. You can go deep on the commercial products (and many of them are genuinely excellent), or you can step into your backyard and find half of what you need growing on a tree. I'm going to walk you through both sides of this. The commercial stuff that works well and is worth your money, and the free natural materials that work just as well if you know how to use them. Because the goal is a great-looking base, and great bases don't care about the price tag on the stuff that built them.

Commercial Texture Pastes

Texture pastes are the easiest on-ramp to basing. Scoop some out, spread it on the base, let it dry, prime and paint. That's genuinely the whole process. The paste creates a textured surface that looks like dirt, mud, gravel, sand, or stone depending on which product you use and how you paint it.

Games Workshop Texture Paints. Astrogranite and Astrogranite Debris are the two most popular. Astrogranite gives you a fine, crackly urban rubble texture. Astrogranite Debris is chunkier, with bigger aggregate pieces mixed in. Stirland Mud and Stirland Battlemire are the earth-toned options, perfect for muddy battlefields and forest floors. Armageddon Dust and Armageddon Dunes do sand and desert. These are thick, they apply easily with a sculpting tool or even a popsicle stick, and the texture they create paints up beautifully. The downside is cost. The pots are small and they're not cheap. If you're basing a whole army, you'll go through them fast.

Vallejo Texture Paste. Vallejo makes a range of texture pastes that come in larger containers for less money per milliliter than the GW options. Their White Pumice paste is probably the most versatile one in the range. It's thick, it creates a fine sandy texture, and it takes paint beautifully. They also make a Black Lava paste that's chunkier, and several pre-colored options like Dark Earth and Desert Sand. What I like about the Vallejo range is the volume. When you're doing twenty bases for an army, having a big tub of paste means you're not rationing it.

AK Interactive. AK makes texture pastes that come from the scale modeling world, and they're excellent. Their Terrains range includes options for mud, sand, concrete, and snow. The mud textures in particular are fantastic because they're designed to look wet and goopy even after they dry. They also make pigment-infused pastes, so the color is built into the texture rather than needing to be painted on afterward. That can be a real timesaver for batch basing.

The Budget Comparison

Let's be real about cost for a second, because this matters if you're building an army.

A pot of GW Astrogranite (24ml) runs about $8-10 and will do maybe 15-20 bases depending on how thick you apply it. Vallejo White Pumice (200ml) costs around $12-15 and will do well over a hundred bases. AK Interactive Terrains sit somewhere in between. If you're basing five models, buy whatever appeals to you. If you're basing fifty, the math strongly favors Vallejo or AK for the base texture, with GW pots as occasional supplements for specific effects.

Or, you know. Dirt is free. Let's talk about that.

Free Natural Materials

I once spent an afternoon wandering around the woods near my house with a collection of bags, looking for basing materials. If any neighbors saw me, they probably thought I was having some kind of episode. But I came home with everything I needed to base an entire army without spending a cent.

Bark. This is one of the most versatile natural basing materials you'll find. Different trees produce wildly different bark. Oak bark is thick and craggy, perfect for rock formations and cliff faces on larger bases. Birch bark peels in thin sheets that can be broken into slate-like pieces. Pine bark has a rough, deeply textured surface that looks incredible as rocky terrain. Collect a variety. Once primed, bark is indistinguishable from sculpted or commercial rock pieces.

Dirt and sand. The literal ground beneath your feet. Scoop up some dirt, spread it on a baking sheet, and bake it in your oven at about 250 degrees for thirty minutes. This kills any organic matter and dries it completely. Once baked, you've got perfectly usable basing material that works exactly like commercial sand. Sieve it through a fine mesh (a kitchen strainer works) to separate the fine powder from the coarser grains. The fine stuff is your ground cover. The coarser stuff is your gravel and small rocks.

Small rocks and pebbles. Sandstone in particular breaks down into beautiful irregular chunks that look like realistic rubble at miniature scale. If you find a soft sandstone, you can break it with a hammer or even by hand into whatever size pieces you need. Harder stones work too. Just break them smaller.

Dried leaves. Collect fallen leaves, let them dry on your counter for about a month until they're completely brittle, then crumble them into a fine powder. This makes incredible ground debris that looks like a real forest floor because it literally is real forest floor, just scaled down. Sprinkle it over PVA glue on your base and you've got instant leaf litter.

Moss. Small patches of moss, once super glued to a base, primed, and painted, look surprisingly like vegetation. The texture is organic and irregular in a way that's hard to replicate with manufactured products. It holds up fine through priming and painting. I've had moss on bases for years and it's gone nowhere.

Dead wood and roots. Rotting wood from the forest floor is perfect. At a certain stage of decay, wood gets brittle and the grain fibers become visible and separated. Break it into small pieces and you've got incredibly realistic miniature logs, fallen trees, and stumps. The wood fibers look exactly right at 28mm scale.

Roots from invasive species. If you've got buckthorn or similar invasive plants in your area, their roots are perfect for gnarled tree roots, tentacles, or organic terrain features. Pull them up (you're doing the ecosystem a favor), wash them, let them dry, and cut to size. The natural twisting shapes are impossible to replicate with sculpting.

Manufactured Basing Accessories

Beyond texture pastes and natural materials, there's a whole ecosystem of basing accessories that add specific effects.

Grass tufts. Self-adhesive clumps of synthetic grass that you peel off a sheet and stick directly onto a finished base. Army Painter, Gamers Grass, and Games Workshop all make these in various sizes, colors, and styles. They're one of the easiest ways to add life to a base. Just pull, stick, done. Mix different sizes and colors on the same base for a natural, varied look. A base with three identical tufts in a row looks manufactured. A base with a big tuft, a small tuft, and some bare ground looks like an actual patch of field.

Static grass. Loose synthetic fibers that stand upright when applied with a static grass applicator (basically a device that uses static electricity to make the fibers point up instead of lying flat). The result looks like actual grass growing out of the ground. Static grass takes more effort than tufts but covers larger areas and looks more like a real meadow or lawn. If you don't have an applicator, you can get a passable result by pressing the fibers into a thick layer of PVA glue. They won't stand as uniformly upright, but for tabletop distance it works.

Snow effects. There are a dozen ways to do snow on bases and they all look slightly different. Valhallan Blizzard from GW is a thick, chunky paste that creates a snow-and-ice look. AK Interactive makes a range of snow products from light frost to deep powder. Baking soda mixed with PVA glue is the budget classic and it works surprisingly well, though it can yellow over time. For the most realistic snow, look into products like Woodland Scenics Soft Flake Snow, which has a fluffy, powdery look that's hard to beat.

Water effects. Woodland Scenics Realistic Water is my go-to for small water features on bases. It's a clear liquid that you pour into a recessed area and it self-levels as it dries, leaving a glossy, transparent surface that looks like still water. For deeper water, apply multiple thin layers and let each one cure fully before adding the next. You can tint it with a tiny amount of ink for murky water or swamp effects. Tiny glass beads pressed into the surface before it cures create realistic bubbles.

Cork. Cork sheet (the kind you get at craft stores or hardware stores) is a basing staple. Tear it (don't cut it) for irregular rocky edges. Stack torn pieces for cliff faces and elevated terrain. Cork is lightweight, easy to shape, and takes glue and paint beautifully. It's cheap in bulk, and once painted, it's genuinely hard to tell from real stone.

The Artis Opus Texture Palette

If you're into drybrushing your bases (and honestly, drybrushing is the fastest way to paint most base textures), the Artis Opus Texture Palette is worth knowing about. It's designed specifically for loading a drybrush with just the right amount of paint and wiping off the excess in a controlled way. Works brilliantly on textured bases where you're drybrushing up from a dark basecoat through several highlight tones. The texture on the palette itself removes paint from the brush more consistently than a paper towel, which means more even drybrushing with less of those random heavy deposits that can ruin a good base texture. It's a small quality-of-life upgrade that makes a noticeable difference when you're drybrushing twenty bases in a row.

Building a Base: Big to Small

Whatever materials you're using, here's the workflow that produces the most natural results. Work from big to small. Start with your largest elements: big rocks, chunks of bark, cork pieces, any major terrain feature. Glue those down first. Then fill in around them with medium elements: smaller rocks, roots, wood debris. Then go smaller still: sand, dirt, fine ground cover. Finally, add the finest details: leaf litter, moss, tufts.

If you go the other way (start small and add big pieces on top), it looks unnatural. Like someone placed a boulder on top of a manicured lawn. In nature, big objects settle into the ground and smaller debris fills in around them. Mimicking that order of operations on your base creates a convincing result almost automatically.

I use two types of super glue for this. Thick super glue for big pieces that need a strong bond and some gap-filling. Thin super glue for the small stuff because it wicks into fine materials like dirt and sand instantly and locks them in place. PVA glue works for large areas of fine material too, but thin super glue is faster if you're only doing a few bases.

Mixing Commercial and Natural Materials

My best bases use both. Texture paste for the main ground surface, natural bark for rocks, commercial tufts for vegetation, and dried leaf powder for forest floor debris. There's no rule that says you have to commit to one approach. The materials don't know where they came from. Once they're primed and painted, natural bark and a Vallejo rock look identical.

The real trick is variety. A base with only one texture looks flat and boring, even if that texture is excellent. A base with three or four different materials at different scales looks alive. Some dirt. A rock. A tuft of grass. A scattering of leaves. That combination takes five minutes to apply and transforms a base from "functional" to "I want to pick this up and look at it."

The products on the market today are genuinely impressive, and if you've got the budget, they make basing fast and reliable. But don't sleep on the free stuff. Some of the most beautiful bases I've seen at competitions used rocks from a driveway and bark from a dead tree. The material doesn't make the base. The composition, the painting, and the attention to variety make the base. The materials are just ingredients.

Now get out there and slay the gray.

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