Creating a sci-fi industrial base for our space-themed miniatures

Just a quick update on our sci-fi soldiers/robots miniatures - having struggled to come up with anything suitable for the bases for our miniatures (except some excellent looking modelling-putty-stamps on Kickstarter) we eventually hit on a solution: curtain netting.

Or more specifically, that weird netting they sell in Fabric Land on Western Road in Brighton - the stuff that comes in all colours and is usually used for frills on skirts and to make tu-tus from. That stuff.

A liberal dose of glue was put over the bases and the netting stretched and glued in place. Once the glue had dried, the netting was trimmed from around the edges of the base using a craft knife, and the entire base was painted black

The entire base was drybrushed with gun metal paint. The idea was to get a dark silvery colour over the whole of the base, not just the raised industrial-grid-like pattern, so drybrushing was done with the brush vertical (at 90 degrees to the plane of the base)

This allowed the bristles to get onto the actual base between the mesh, but still kept a dark shadow effect under each hole in the grill. Then the entire base was drybrushed with a brighter, shining armour silver. This time the brush was held almost horizontally, so that the drybrushing only touched the top surface of the grid pattern

The end result was an industrial looking base which fits in perfectly with our spaceship-themed playing surface: