Make Your Own Textured Base "Paint".

I think we've all seen the Citadel technical paint range, in it there is a textured paint designed for basing. In my view it's pretty pointless being made available in the teeny weeny pots that GW sell it in and to be honest it's way over priced for what it is.

 The finished bases before static grass put onSo, in the video below I show you how to make your own. All this base paint is, in it's basic form, is an acrylic gel with some texture material and a pigment. The GW range is fairly limited, but if you make your own you can have whatever colour you wish, if you have the colour on your paint shelf, then you can make a textured paint in that colour (not tried metallics though).

The Gels are available in most craft, hobby or artists shop that sell a good range of art materials. You can get smooth untextured gels to heavy coarse ones. You can add not only pigment / paint to the gel but you can add more texture in the form of sand, grit, cat litter whatever if you need it to be more textured. You can pick up a decent sized tub of acrylic gel for the same price as about three pots of the citadel texture paint, but be able to make over 40+ pots worth at least!

These gels are designed to take pigment / colour and when dry show that colour with the same luminosity as would be seen if you just painted the area with the flat colour, unlike filler / spackle which take huge volumes of paint to even start to change colour and when dry look nothing like the colour .. so still need over painting.


I hope this proves as useful to someone as it has been for me, I base a lot of figures, using this stuff saves me base painting on multiple figure / lage bases, it gives depth to the base and further modelling opportunities on the base work.

Have fun and keep on hobbying!