So, you are quite good at painting and you want to go with your passion further? Have you thought about decorating bases once or twice (or constantly;-)) but you checked prizes for official decorations like grass, etc and said: “on my dead body I will pay for that”? Free solutions are closer than you think. Kitchen and garden/park/wood are full of things you need to make bases your minis deserve.

What do you need?

If you have glue at home than it’s very possible you need only to rob your kitchen and go for a short walk around the home. You gonna need:

• paper glue (this for decoupage is ok),
• much stronger glue (super glue, to the plastic, or similar),
• black tea and kitchen dry spices like basil, oregano, dill, marjoram, parsley, allspice, curry,
• little rocks, twigs, and tree bark.

Experiment, experiment and experiment again – test every reasonable materials, mix spieces together to ahcieve new effects, etc.

Picture below: for the left base was used a black tea, for the right one dill with a little twig.

How to make the real looking base?

Now it’s not rocket science, the process is easy:

• Apply strong glue to the base in the spot you want to attach something heavier like rock or twig,
• Put also a little bit of glue on the rock/twig and attach to the base, pressing it strong for a while.
• Apply the paper glue to the remaining free space on the base (normally, it’s white, it will go transparent after drying),
• Sprinkle free, glued spaces with loose elements like spices and wait around 15 minutes (this glue dries slowly so you can remove unwanted spices from some areas using pancetta if you do this right after sprinkling).

Picture below: for the left base was used curry, for the right one oregano.

Time for a test, take your base and blow into it over the sink few times – normally, some parts of used spices will go to the sink. If you think too much spice was blown away and the base has some blank unwanted spaces, then apply paper glue and sprinkle loose elements once more. Some spices, like curry or paprika, need to repeat this process, but with basil, parsley and similar you shouldn’t have any problems.

Picture below: for the left base was used allspice ball, little rock, and oregano, for the right one just oregano.