Basing with cork – Escaping the sandbox

Some years back someone showed me who to make cool bases with cork – A neat little trick to avoid bases that look like a sand-box. The raw material for this is cork, taken from cork tablemats, those that were hot in the 1990s or so??

There are a lot of pros to using these opposed to bark, stones, wood-chip, plaster etc:

1. Cork is cheap – I bought 2 cork table mats for 2€, and they’ll last me a lifetime.
2. Cork is easy to work with – You can shape it using your fingers, but once glued in place it is very durable.
3. Cork is clean – Stuff you find in the garden needs to be baked to avoid maggots, rot, fungus and other nasty stuff.

Working with the cork from the tablemats is pretty easy. I simply tear it apart and find some suitable pieces that fits the base. Some times I glue multiple layers of cork on top of each other to get height on the base.

I glue the cork to the base using PVA glue, and allow time for it to dry before basing the rest with flock or sand.

Then I apply PVA to the rest of the base and use a tub with sand or flock.

After the PVA holding sand or flock has dried I apply a layer of 50:50 PVA:Water to seal everything and prevent the sand from coming off when the mini is painted and transported to battle. 

Following that I tend to litter the bases with bits from the bitsbox, to add some additional effects to the base.

And finally an example from some Space Marines that I did using this method. On a side note this method is excellent for lava-bases – All you have to do is to leave cracks between the pieces of cork and then paint them like lava.

/Nicolai aka Atoom