Welcome to Finishing Touch!

Hi, I'm Rob, and welcome to The Finishing Touch, a review site about basing materials for miniature wargaming and terrain.

That seems like a weird thing to want to talk about.

Well I'm a weird kind of guy. But I have my reasons!

Basing my miniatures is one of my favourite parts of a project. It brings the piece together, and feels like the moment my miniature goes from being a small plastic man to being part of my squad, my army and the world I imagined when I first decided to make them.

But it's a step I see a lot of people be nervous about, both in person and online. They're either afraid that they're going to mess their model up or make it look out of place on their gaming table, or are just reluctant to start experimenting with it on a model that cost them an arm and a leg. Which is fair!

So I see a lot of people just put a layer of texture paint on and call it a day. Or just paint the whole base black, "because it'll look weird if I have an industrial base and I play on a snowy table someday". Or worst of all, just don't paint it at all, and consign their well painted little guys to stand in puddles of the same colour they painted the boots. "C'mon mate", I want to say to them, "it's easy, I promise!"

Then I realised it kind of isn't.

How come?

Increasingly we have to do all our hobby shopping online and, if you already know what to look for, you can find retailers who sell basing materials, but aside from a close-up picture of a pile of it (or even just a photo of the tub or baggie it comes in) you just have to put down your £7-10 or more and see what comes in the post. Then when the tub of grey dust you think would look good on your squad finally arrives, it's the wrong shade. Or it's not dirt but some kind of fluff called "flock", that seems to be made out of sponge? Did you misread the store listing or something? Then you stick it on with what you think is the right kind of glue only for it to go weirdly dark or clear once it's dried, and everyone online who recommended it to you seemed to assume you already knew not to use that glue. And that guy you watch on Youtube (who gets his own basing materials for free as review copies) insists that you could have totally based your models yourself, if only you'd thought to bake your old coffee grounds in the oven and taken a bus to your local park to look for twigs like some kind of trash goblin.

It sort of makes sense now that people are too intimidated to try it, doesn't it?

And that's where this site comes in?

Yes!

I may not be able to teach you how to make your paintjobs be the talk of the gaming club, or how to come up with winning strategies to take home... the gold? (See? I'm so bad at actually playing games with my minis that I'm not even sure what you win at tournaments.) But I can talk your ear off about different granularities of basing sand, and how to pick which tufts will work for your 28mm models and your 6mm models, and if I can save you a tenner on a tub of sand that's 2 shades darker than it was on the website, then it's worth doing.

So what's actually going to be posted here?

I've got some reviews lined up, of a variety of basing materials and other related products, which will be the bread and butter of this site going forward. It's all using stuff I've purchased myself - and if that's ever not the case, I'll make it clear - and I'll be showing how it looks out of the tub, at different scales and used in different ways, and talking about any issues there are with using it.

In time I'm also hoping to put up some hobby articles where I talk about actually using this stuff, picking a good basing scheme, that sort of thing. The first reviews will be going up in the coming days, and we'll see where it goes from there.

Thanks for reading, and remember - your model's not complete without the finishing touch!