Skeletons are also a common sight on miniatures, bases and terrain in most horror or grimdark settings, so let's take a look at some fun ways to spice up how you can use them on your own bases or terrain.
The Ubiquitous Warhammer Base Skull
Skulls - you know 'em, if you're reading this you almost certainly have one, and you've probably seen your fair share of wargaming models standing next to a skull or five on their base.
These especially dedicated Genestealers, for example, have whiled away the hours between Space Marine incursions intricately stacking the crew's carefully cleaned skulls and helmets into Hero Rocks around the ship that they can pose on, like an interior design show set in an ossuary.
Having just a skull sat on your model's base in Warhammer specifically is now so common that many models' Hero Rocks have them built in, a lot of Games Workshop's terrain is stuffed with the things, and they even sell a pack of nothing but skulls of various kinds for your own use. And I can respect that - I own one of those packs, and have made use of them on my own minis and later on in this article. But the thing about ubiquitous things is, without a bit of care or their own unique flair to them, they can become cliche and boring. A generic base skull has a tendency to just sit there, contextless, like a tumbleweed that's rolled to a stop while your miniature steps around it without noticing it. And isn't it kind of weird that the rest of the body's always been cleaned away but left the head behind?
I didn't want to pick on someone else's mini, so here's one I made earlier:
A rock, and a skull, sitting in the dirt. If you want, or you're in a hurry, that can be as far as you need to go, perhaps with a tuft to finish things off. But we can do better, right? Your minis deserve better than boring, given how long you've taken to paint them. So here's one thing I want you to think about to get you started. Skulls don't just spawn on the spot like vegetation; someone put it there, even if that person was its original owner falling to the ground and dying. So what can we do with the rest of the bones?
66 Skeletons? In This Economy?
If you're going to be putting skeletons on your bases or terrain you're going to need the right kit. Most skeleton miniatures are designed to stand alongside other, more fleshy miniatures so their proportions are a bit on the chunky "Heroic" side. Those of you who've put together one of the many Warhammer Fantasy skeleton kits over the years will remember how big the hands are, in order to still grip their similarly heroic-scale weapons now that their flesh is gone, but even more modern kits like the one from Wargames Atlantic are fairly sturdy as a good miniature should be.
This doesn't have to be a dealbreaker, however, especially if you're only putting one or two bones or a skull on your base. Perhaps it's just the bones of a big guy, or something not altogether human? But we're instead going to use an older kit for a lot of these bases below: the Skeleton Warriors kit originally made by Wargames Factory (now defunct) and now sold by Warlord Games under their Warlords of Erehwon range.
Having done this before, I bought in bulk this time:
I'm going to be upfront with you here - as actual wargaming miniatures, these skeletons are terrible. By making the bones truescale it makes them wobbly to put together and spindly when they're finished, their feet are separate from their legs and have to be plugged onto the ankles, and the skulls include two that I've never found a use for; one with cartoon devil horns and fangs, and one that looks like an alien doing a Gigachad smirk.
Those weird things on the right side are holes for your skeletons to burst out of your bases through. I've never bothered to use them.
But for our purposes they come with several advantages:
- Their weapons are separate from their hands, meaning that their hands won't still be clenched once you cut their weapon off, and you can bend or cut off the fingers as needed.
- Apart from the helmeted heads there's nothing about them that anchors them to a specific setting, such as scraps of clothes or armour, or rags that hang off a standing mini but look awkward in any other pose.
- They're small enough to act as bones of other 28-32mm miniatures while still being in the same scale, so your miniatures won't be stepping over femurs as thick as Pringles cans.
Some of these advantages can be found in other kits - those heroic scale Wargames Atlantic ones would just need the puddle bases and weapons cutting off, and the helmeted head relegated to the bits box, for example - but this one will suit us just fine.
In Situ or All Mixed Up
Let's start by adding a few more bones onto our basic skull to make as much skeleton as we can get on this 28mm base. Here I've used a skull with a suitably fatal looking crack in it and left a lot of the rest of the bones intact; apart from chopping the left arm in two and taking off a legbone (which could perhaps be scavengers or simply the effects of time) this body looks like it could have lain where it fell all these years. This already adds a sense of place without us having to think that hard about who this skeleton is or how he got here.
The one thing I have done to make sure these bones sit properly in the dirt is sand some of them down. For a sturdier grip, I stick a wad of blu-tack to them to hold while sanding, which also stops you skinning your fingertips. This makes a nice, flat contact point to glue your ribcage or bigger bones to your base, and prevents any weird gaps or bones floating in midair.
If you do get any weird gaps between bone and base, a tuft or a little extra basing material can easily cover it up.
Bones do gradually get separated over time, usually, whether by the elements, scavengers or just falling apart as the remains decompose. These bones of a camel in Mauritania, for example have suffered the effects of all three, and you can only just tell where the "body" used to be:
While we don't have as much space to play with on a regular wargaming base (though you might if you're doing this on terrain!), let's see what jumbling the bones up a little can achieve:
Here I decided to work around the rock the miniature is going to eventually be standing on - perhaps this unfortunate archer slouched against it in their dying moments or was flung into it by whoever killed them. I've again taken apart the pelvis and its attached bone, but this time cut the ribcage in half vertically (the other ribs may be buried or eaten) and gone with a jawless skull. Since the kit comes with all those spare weapons I've even cut one in half and stuck it down nearby - did their bow breaking leave them helpless, or was the blow that split the skull also strong enough to shear through their weapon?
The Passage of Time
Let's say you do just want a classic skull, or even just a bone or two loose underfoot. We can still use some tricks to add a little flavour to our base.
This head has rolled to a stop - possibly as it clattered to the floor upon being severed - by some rocks where, by nesting it amongst some overgrown tufts, we can give the impression that a lot of time has passed since this head met its end. Or, at the very least, helped our skull feel like a part of the environment instead of just a prop. And I didn't even need to sand this one down!
Before we move on, let's take a moment here to talk about something I said earlier about this very skull - the idea of "anchoring" yourself to a certain time or setting by your choice of bits. This skulls' in a very Greek looking helmet, for example. If it's a Hoplite or a Minotaur stepping over it, then so much the better. But if your miniature is a Napoleonic soldier then, unless he's part of a Silver Bayonet unit exploring a forgotten tomb, he may well be more interested in scavenging and selling this antique helmet than whatever he's meant to be shooting at.
Giving Your Bones That Sinking Feeling
Here's another one where I've used just a skull, though a ribcage in particular would also be a good bit to use.
This effect was made by building up the base with putty except for a recess, into which I glued a heavily filed-down skull with its mouth open. After paint and texture paste were applied and dried, I dropped in a helping of Vallejo's still water FX to mostly cover the skull and give the impression of a bog body risen up from the mire. Little puddles on bases like this are about the only thing I trust this product for, as it seeps through other scenics on your base and will crack if you put on too much at once. So if you've got a better water effect product then use it, but here it's managed to do the job.
Don't be afraid to bury your bones somewhat - one of the things that makes a generic base skull look tacked on is the way they can just sit on the ground, especially if you glue it on after the rest of the base is done. A lot of things can happen to a body before it becomes a skeleton, including being buried or exhumed, so partially exposed skeletons can give a great sense of place to your bases. Plus it's less of the skeleton to paint!
Carrion - Nature's Leftovers
If you do own that Citadel Skulls pack or a lot of "desert" themed minis from games such as Dead Man's Hand, you'll likely have a lot of those classic "sheep skull with big horns" bits for using on your bases. While these look very cool on their own, they can be a little hard to work with; because of the shape, they kind of just have to sit flat on the ground unless you want to chop up the horns, and you usually don't get any other bones of the right size to go with them to represent the rest of the sheep.
Happily, however, a human ribcage isn't that far off a sheep's, and at a cursory glance one can pass for the other by sanding it down a little and using a little extra basing material to bury it a bit.
I've left this one a little bare, to show the proportions between the ribcage and the skull, but real life desert carrion often ends up with a lot of the fur left on. Nobody likes accidentally eating a hair, right?
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Images via ノボホショコロトソ under Creative Commons license 3.0 and CanyonlandsNPS under public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Applying a little putty or liquid greenstuff and texturing it with some fur pattern would easily get you this effect, and if your ribcage is a little small next to the skull then building up the putty around the ribcage can make it seem like a body that's been cracked open to get to the good stuff.
The Innumerable Dead
Let's say you want to go big; as big and grimdark as possible. Just an absolutely cartoonish amount of bones, such as you'd see in the background in Diablo or Doom and try not to think about how many dead people that represents.
I'm not allowed to play any more Boltgun 2 until I've finished this article
While just stacking a layer of skulls on your bases and gluing the model on top would be possible, bones are poor footing and often fragile, particularly if you're wearing power armour or a monster the size of a car. Or both! Thankfully a base made of a pile of bones doesn't have to be literally all bones.
This WIP shot shows that, before priming, I dipped my miniature's feet in paint and used that to apply a footprint blob where the feet will go, so that I could build around it. Then, like a much less cool Doomslayer, I cut and sanded and clipped until it was done and applied various bits of our skeletons to the base, making sure not to either go overboard on any individual piece or use exactly enough bits to make one complete skeleton. This gives the impression of a much wider quantity or variety of bodies on the base while also preventing it from looking like your warrior has wandered into the femur aisle of this battlefield specifically.
So how does it look when it's painted up?
bat queen
This is the base for a Vampire Bat Queen monster who'll be a "final boss" in my Silver Bayonet games, and I had a clear visual in my head of what her lair would look like - partially eaten remains of her victims discarded and mashed underfoot, still sticky with gore and saliva. If you're someone who likes their Flesh Eater Courts or remembers the Hunter's Nightmare in Bloodborne, you'll know the vibe.
For the parts of the ground that will be smooth, I put down some flattened Milliput and superglued in all manner of bones - both partial and intact - before globbing on some of Dirty Down's Snot effects. I'm not usually a fan of the whole "UHU Glue and blood paint" method for doing gore - it always makes me think the model's just stretching some red taffy or something, and I'm paranoid about it getting snapped while handling it. But in this case the gunge is getting coated in a layer of primer and paint, and won't be in places where the model is getting handled. This should do nicely for a mushy carpet of gore. The rest of the base is covered with Vallejo mud texture, so that the fibres and clumps could be mud in one area and entrails or bone shards in another.
You'll see I've also stuck in a couple of little trinkets here and there - a book, a jar and a carved stone I made with leftover putty once and never found a use for. This miniature is going to be almost entirely for horror and fantasy games, but by making these items that are more timeless than, say, a spear or a magic artefact, I've tried to avoid the anchoring problem I've mentioned earlier.
Let's see how it looks once it's all painted up.
Well I certainly got the sticky feeling for the gore nailed down! By burying the bones in the mud and covering them with the gore, the overall mush is immediately readable as a pile of remains and as you look closer the eyes are drawn to the more recognisable bits, as you think "eeww, that's a ribcage, isn't it?" I could maybe have gone a little further in picking out the bones with some highlights, but I figured that might diminish the effect of the blood. Besides, there's a reason this site's not tutorials on improving your painting!
A Big Ol' Pile Of Them Bones
With that, and with Halloween upon us, I hope that's given you some ideas or things you might wanna try next time you're adding a spooky, sombre or stomach-turning touch to your bases. Just so long as I haven't put you off your Halloween candy with those carrion photos and pictures of the Vampire's nest!
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