Current Work #1 (All Your Base Are Belong to Us)

This post should hopefully bring us up to where I am at present in the hobby.

Having finally picked up my Grey Knights (an army list and more info can be found on this page), I go to work assembling the models. I read a lot of stuff on how to assemble, how to paint, how to base, and still find the breadth of the hobby world quite overwhelming. I wanted to have a "showcase" army, which meant jazzing up my bases. After deciding that 3rd party resin bases were not in the cards (though I still drool over the bases at Secret Weapon Miniatures and The Dragon Forge), I got inspiration on the boards at Grey Knights Forum, a collection of nice people and immense talent). In this particular case, inspiration came from a member of the board named Valten, on page 24 of his aptly titled thread, Valten's Pics! Specifically, his simple, yet impressive use of plasticard (a new word in my hobby vocabulary) inspired me to seek out some of this product and go from there.

After a lot of slow going, I managed to get my bases together (More pics after the break):

Please mind the poor quality - lost original & linked from old forum post

With millions of planets in the Imperium to choose from, I decided on a Mars-esque, red planet theme for my bases. The majority of the work was done with 3 colours, Vallejo Heavy Red (which I am not a huge fan of - for an "Extra Opaque" paint, it goes on very streaky and requires too many coats), followed by some Citadel Wazdakka Red & Evil Sunz Scarlet. The progress to date is below:

Coteaz & his Henchmen

GK Strike Squad x2

Paladins

GK Dreadknight

While I am fairly satisfied with their look at this point, I feel that they need some more punch. I hope to use washes to selectively add some more shadows followed by a highlight of some sort, either a Bleached Bone or a yellow-orange, or something in-between. Additionally, I thought about adding some tufts of grass, but have decided against that for now. Instead, I may add some debris (skulls, shell casings, etc...) on select bases to add a bit more colour and diversity (and definitely spruce up my DK base as it is pretty barren).

Once that is complete I will be pinning the models to the bases to prevent separation. 

This hobby takes a lot of work...