Champion Of Nurgle - Scenic base part 1

Fairly early on in the painting process of the Champion I decided to make a scenic base for the miniature. There are many websites on the internet who sell scenic bases in every flavour you might imagine but I prefer to make my own.
This allows me to design the surface of the base to fit the miniature perfectly, blending the design and concept of the figure with the base to create a cohesive whole. My plan for the Champion Of Nurgle was to create a rocky outcrop, with small pools of ichor added in the corners. I also planned to add minuscule flies and things to the base as an extra detail.

I wanted to make a silicone rubber mold of the base when it was done so I could make resin casts of the base for future use with other Nurgle miniatures if I so desired. Because I planned to make a mold of the base it gave me the freedom to use a sculpting compound that would normally not be suited for basing but that I find very pleasant to work with.
Super Sculpey is a polymer clay that needs to be hardened in the oven and can then be painted or worked on further. It has a tendency to shatter or chip quite badly over time so it's not suitable to use for basing, but it's waxy fine texture is very pleasant to work with and takes detail very well. Basically I would sculpt the base detail on top of a clean plastic base I had lying around and leave it soft. Experience has taught me that the sculpted detail would not be damaged if I poured the liquid mold rubber over the top of it as long as I did it gently.

I started out with simply adding a small ball of Sculpey to the top of the base and flattened it out until it covered the surface and was about three mm thick. I then trimmed the edge so about one mm of the plastic base surface was showing around it.

The next step was to start shaping the Sculpey into a stony surface. I first pressed in some cracks and lines onto the surface with a sculpting tool and then started to gently press down onto the material at certain points to create different levels and slopes.
By gentle scraping the material as well as pushing it down I slowly started to create the basic shape of the rock.

Creating natural texture and surfaces with a sculpting compound is probably one of the most challenging things you could attempt in this hobby. It's not as simple as sculpting a few shards and jagged lumps or glueing a few chips of slate onto a base and calling it "rocks".

One of the most important things to keep in mind is the sense of scale. The smaller the scale of the item you're trying to re-create the harder it becomes to keep it looking right.
This might sound like a daft thing to say but if you look at most miniature manufacturers in the fantasy and science fiction realms you will notice that the heads and hands will not actually be "in scale" to the height of the miniature, but minutely larger. This is done for two reasons. The first is to facilitate the painting of the miniatures and the second is because the way our brain processes visual information. If the hands and faces would be exactly the right size in relation of the height of the body the figures will end up looking "wrong". This seems to get worse the smaller the scale of the miniatures get.

The above example is not going to influence the sculpting of the base directly but another scaling issue will. The smaller the miniature, the more it becomes stylised, in that very small details will not be represented accurately. Individual hair strands will not be represented but the hair as a mass will for instance.
With the rock surface, this also needs to be taken into account. I'd have to keep the ridges, cracks and layers to just the right amount of detail so it doesn't look out of place with the Champion Of Nurgle. The older Citadel miniatures are far more stylised and cartoony than the current releases and I had to be careful to get the balance right. I'm perhaps obsessing too much over it, but these are little details that really niggle me if it's not done the way I feel is "right".