The Christmas Brigades - Basing

The obvious next stage is to base the troops.

I mark out 20mm squares on a sheet of plastic trying to make them as accurate as possible and also square. This will help ranking the figures up later.

Make enough bases for all the figures you have painted and the next batch and the next batch. A lot of time can be saved by preparing lots of bases in one go. You can also discard any 'duds' where your accuracy has let you down.

The painted troops with their gloss varnish completely dry can be removed from their painting sticks. Try and and keep the little blobs of Blue-Tac separate as you will be re-using them for the next batch of troops.

Using a contact adhesive glue the figures to their bases bearing in mind that the troops have to rank up neatly and any protuding parts have to avoid the adjacent figures. One thing which not obvious on these pictures is that the base of the drummer figure is exceeds 20mm in depth so I fix that by filing the base down to 19mm before I paint them. This will matter less if you are using deeper bases.

Finally I add a layer of self adhesive magnetic tape underneath the base as I use magnetic movement trays for my ACW troops. Try and keep the magnetic pole oriented the same way on each figure as sometimes the like poles can push figures apart.