Mad Dave here again and as promised on our FB page I have a review of Secret Weapon Mini’s Blasted Wastelands resin base along with and more importantly one of their awesome basing kits, in this instance the Instant Scenery Kit: Wetlands.

I have been gaming for a lifetime but my modelling and basing skills range from poor to average at best, and I wanted to see if using a pro-basing kit from Secret Weapon could make even my bases look good.

As stated this is part one and here’s why, I had two sets in mind to review, first was the wetlands as I love the swamp look it achieves and the second set I chose was the Instant Scenery Kit: Winter, to practice my snow basing abilities for my Khador army.

From left to right the set contains:

Fine Sand, Fine Turf Soil, Olive Underbrush, Field Grass Light green and Natural Straw. The set also includes a 1/2 oz. bottle of both realistic water effect and white glue.

Get on With It!

Ok I rambled on a bit there so I will get on with it.

I began with a simple base coat of black applied directly to the resin base which I was happily surprised just how well the base took the paint. After that I started to apply several coats of browns and greens with various degrees of black mixed in, I wanted the ground to have no set colour, it’s a brown, green, black, grey colour lol.

As you can see from the above picture all the wood areas have been painted in light brown tones  with some dry brushing.

I later went back and added a brown ink wash to the brown areas to add depth.

Now as you can see I didn’t exactly go over board on the painting side of things and I would probably have left this base as is if I was using it for a mini and not adding the effects for the wetlands.

     Now For The Swamp.

I started buy trying to picture in my head exactly how I wanted the base to look and what I wanted to use from the kit.

I opted to go with a little of the grass / reeds and loads of the shrub with.

Above you can see the tuft of reeds growing up from the side of the trunk and if a model was being added to the base it keeps the grass well out of the way.

With the shrub I started by separating out pieces of the olive under-brush and looking for nice bits and shapes and building them up on the base a bit at a time.

I tried to follow the natural flow of the base by putting the shrub in and around the tree roots.

I then added the realistic water effect trying to keep it even and getting it in to all the right places.

Note: It take upto 24 hours for the water effect to dry.

The above two pictures are of the finished base.

After the first application of water effect had dried I realised I had used to much and it had all been soaked up by the shrub and I had to add another coat, but it’s all a learning experience.

     Water Water Everywhere.

So one finished 30mm base using the wetlands scenery kit, but what’s the verdict?

As I said before I wanted to see just how easy using these kits are for us gamers that wouldn’t call ourselves modellers, and I have to say I am in love with this kit and I am in no doubt that I will be using it again.

I made a few wee minor mistakes, but overall I’m still happy with the finished base and with two different colours of grass, the shrub and sand along with the water effect and white glue there are plenty of options for basing even plain bases never mind resin scenic bases.

If you want to see more of Secret Weapon basing kits have a look here.