I made these bases to give me something a bit more interesting to stand my models on when I photograph them.
Small Base
Large Base
The first one is a small base that depicts the corner of an airfield, with grass on two corners and a little shrub or bush to liven it up. This one can be used for 1/72 and smaller 1/48 aircraft.
The second one is much larger and depicts a strip of airfield, with a simple grass border at each side, suggesting that this is just part of a much longer air strip.
This one can be used for most scales, so long as you’re not too worried about the size of the concrete blocks compared to the scale of your aircraft model.
They were both really easy to make, and done more or less in the same way.
The base was made out of a piece of MDF (you could use chip board if you like) cut to the desired size.
To make the edge a bit neater, I used strips of wood moulding or beading, these were cut to the correct size and panel pinned on to the edge of the wood base. I tried to leave a bit of a lip around the top edge to hem in the grass and concrete sections.
Decide on how you want your air strip to run – its best not to run it parallel to the edge of the board because it will look a little boring. I decided to put mine at a bit of an angle to liven it up.
The concrete blocks are made of cardboard, scavenged from cereal packets or the backs of notepads. These are mostly a nice grey colour so you don’t really need to paint them. I cut then in to squares to represent the concrete blocks (if you are concerned about scale there are measurements for the blocks out there on the internet) and glued them on to the wooden base in the desired orientation using PVA glue.
To make the grass on the edge of your airfield, I used Railway modelling scenic grass. I painted the grass area with green paint first; then when it was dry, painted on some more PVA glue that had been watered down a bit. Then I gradually sprinkled on the scenic grass; you need to get plenty on. The best way to do this is sit the board on some news paper, get loads of scenic grass on, then carefully tip the excess on to the paper; you can then use this again on the next section to be grassed.
When all of the glued components had dried, I just needed to highlight the joints between the concrete sections, for this I used various shades of artists chalk pastels, I just rubbed and smudged them on with my finger.
Job done I now had a simple base to use for photographs or displays, with the smaller one I dressed it up with a couple of shrubs in the corners.
Hope this helps.
Karl
