Painting Tutorial: Tzeentch Shattered Dominion Bases
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Hello there, my fellow Architects of Fate! I’m finally getting around to painting up my Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower miniatures after five years of procrastination, and I found myself in need of a basing scheme that was both straightforward to implement and that would suit the styling of the Silver Tower floor tiles. That meant some combination of blue and gold.
I’ve had good experiences using Games Workshop’s pre-sculpted Shattered Dominion bases for other projects, and I decided to use them again here. With the right techniques, they’re a great way to get a solid result with relatively little time and effort.
While these bases won’t be winning any awards, they look pretty good on the tabletop - and sometimes that’s all you need. I think this style of base is great not just for Disciples of Tzeentch armies in Age of Sigmar, but also Starborne Seraphon and maybe even Tzeentch daemon armies in Warhammer 40K.
Citadel Paints Used:
Abaddon Black
Baharroth Blue
Blue Horror
Drakkenhof Nightshade
Liberator Gold
Nuln Oil
Pallid Wych Flesh
Reikland Fleshshade
Retributor Gold
Sotek Green
Stegadon Scale Green
Psst! If you buy all your Shattered Dominion bases, paints, brushes and whatnot from Firestorm Games using this link you’ll get a tasty discount on the RRP, and you’ll really be helping me out!
Step 1: Base Coat
Firstly, you’ll want to prime or undercoat your bases with some kind of spray - Chaos Black, Mechanicus Standard Grey or Macragge Blue would all be good choices, but really any colour is fine as long as you follow it up with a solid base coat. That base coat is Stegadon Scale Green (which looks blue to my eyes, but I guess we all see things a little differently). Be sure to thin your paint slightly with a little water to avoid obscuring the detail, and apply two-to-three thin coats.
Next, apply a thin wash of Nuln Oil over the whole base, just to darken the recesses a little.
Click on any of the images in this tutorial to see a larger version.
Step 2: Stippling
Ah yes, it’s the obligatory stippling step! No Realm of Plastic painting tutorial should be without it! I’m running out of unique and interesting ways to explain stippling at this point, and I should really just make some kind of glossary page that I can link to - but until that time, here’s yet another explanation of the stippling technique…
Avail yourself of a suitably sized drybrush, ideally an old one with slightly splayed bristles but a newer one will do (although this technique will absolutely ruin it, so it will be perfect for next time). For all but the largest bases I typically use a Citadel small or medium drybrush. Dip your brush in unthinned paint straight from the pot, and then wipe off the excess. Dab the tip of the brush onto some tissue paper or kitchen roll a few times to get a sense of how much paint it’s soaked up - if you see a single large blob then you need to wipe off more, and if you see barely any paint at all then you’ve wiped off too much. What you really want to see is a cluster of small spots, a sort of speckled effect (this is why splayed bristles are better).
When you see this on the paper you’re ready to apply it to your base in exactly the same way, repeatedly dabbing the tip of the bristles onto the surface at a 90-degree angle to build up a mottled texture. You may need to thin your paint ever so slightly with water if your paint spots are looking a little blobby. I started by stippling my bases with Sotek Green. I then did the same with Baharroth Blue and finally Blue Horror. With each new colour I applied slightly more limited coverage - the Sotek Green was applied all over, but by the time I got to Blue Horror I was only stippling about a quarter of the base. You can see in the pictures below that I’ve concentrated the stippling on just a few areas to create some interesting variance in how the surface texture looks.
Step 3: Drybrush & Pin Shade
Drybrush the surface of the base with Pallid Wych Flesh by preparing the paint on your brush in exactly the same way we did for the stippling. This time, instead of dabbing at the surface, you’ll be dragging the brush rapidly, back and forth across the surface, concentrating on the raised areas and edges. When you’re removing paint from the brush in preparation for this step, I recommend removing more paint than you typically would for drybrushing, as we’re applying a very light colour onto a very dark colour, and we don’t want the highlight to be too harsh.
I then like to make the surface texture pop a little more, giving the recesses around the raised details a ‘pin shade’ with Drakenhof Nightshade. This involves using the shade paint and a fine detail brush to apply the shade specifically and carefully along the recessed edges of these areas. The difference it makes is subtle and it can take a little time and patience, so you could get away with skipping this step and still end up with a good result.
Step 4: Gold
Adding some gold to the base really creates a nice contrast with the blue, but I find it looks a little weird and ineffective unless it’s applied to only the very deepest recesses of the base. A lot of the Shattered Dominion bases have these deep crevices in them, and I find that this is where the gold works best - almost as though the floor has cracked to reveal a seam of gold below, or there’s a stream of molten gold running between the rock.
First I apply a base coat of Retributor Gold, followed by a layer of Liberator Gold. I then apply a pin shade to the recessed edges along the bottom of the crevice using Reikland Fleshshade - this helps to blend the gold with the dark blue a little better.
You could also try using silver instead of gold, which I think would work equally well.
With the gold applied, all you have to do is paint the rim of the base in your preferred colour. I like to use Abbadon Black, but a very dark blue or even gold could work here too. And there you have it - a quick, simple and effective method of basing your Tzeentch models!
If you use this tutorial I’d love to see the results - tweet me @realmofplastic on Twitter or comment on the Realm of Plastic Facebook page.
