Repainging all my Legions Imperialis bases

Hey,

I've started collecting Legions Imperialis a few months ago and painted up a small force. And it looked good, I was proud of it. But, the basing schema wasn't working well. The grey blends with the metallic models too much. I tried to make the models a warm metallic and the base a cold grey, but honestly, at this scale that's too subtle.

So, I started looking into repainting them. Mars basing is well known to work with IW; the bright colors create an effective backdrop, and the tones are similar to rust so nothing stands out too much.

I tested the scheme on 4 bases. One base would tell me a lot, but this is a game of large scales, so I feel painting up a single base would make me focus more on the detail of that single base than the general mood.

I liked it a lot! Enough to repaint some 40 bases of infantry I had already painted.

You might be wondering, how to repaint all those bases without ruining the painted models? Isn't that a chore? Well, yes and no. I already glue the little guys on the base before priming anything - I really need the plastic cement to take, because I don't want the models to pop off during handling. Especially considering my bases are all magnetized, and the base is too thin to grab, so the models are really what I handle all the time.

So, it's fine. I just painted around them. What's hard to reach doesn't need much attention, as long as it's some shade of brown or orange it's good enough. I used a small drybrush where that was needed, and it's only needed in open areas and edges.

Here's the recipe:

• Before priming, glue on some pebbles, or pipes or barrels or random bits for interest. Especially if the base is looking a bit sparse in places.
• Prime in black.
• A random wetblend of Scale75 Brown Leather and Mars Orange. Two layers should be enough. It should look random so don't bother smoothing things out, and apply paint thick, it's just a base.
• Lightly drybrush a mix of Mars Orange and Proacryl Warm Flesh, or some other beige you have around. Just lightly, mostly to pick out the rocks, and to bring up the edge of the base up a bit. I wanted the base to form a halo around the models.
• Paint all the rocks in gray, with edge highlights dots in light gray towards white.
• Wash the whole base in Guilliman Flesh. Mid-Heavy towards the middle, lighter towards the edge; if it's too heavy towards the edge you can use a clean, wet brush to dilute it a bit while it's still drying.
• Reestablish a bit of gray towards white on the rocks and such, where you feel it's needed. The rocks should still belong to the same environment, be reddish, but still be seen as different from the ground.
• Paint the rim in Musou Black.
• Edge highlight the rim, all steps and all panel lines on the base in Tau Light Ochre.

I also started applying some of the same paints to my tank tracks but I didn't finish that work yet.

Here are some pics of the collection with the new bases and a bunch of new stuff I have painted since. Thanks for looking.