Over the years I have received a number of compliments on my giant bat swarm bases that I made from bat shaped Halloween confetti. I thought I would recreate the project on my blog in the form of a tutorial so others could copy this idea.
While I originally created them for use with 25mm armies, I now employ them with my 10mm forces. The great thing about giant bats is that the scale is really flexible.
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| Here is a shot of my original giant bat swarm bases (seen on the bottom left). |
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| And here is a shot of my new version, shown with a 25mm figure |
So here's how I made the new giant bat swarm:
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| Bat shaped confetti from JoAnns. All their Halloween decorations are already on sale. |
I took a trip to JoAnn's Craft & Fabric store, and found this pack of bat confetti, while not the exact style I used in my originals, I thought the shape and size would be good for my purposes.
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| Step 1, gluing bats to their wire flight stands |
The first thing I did was to cut six 3 inch sections of thin wire, and separated out six of the individual pieces of bat confetti. At the end of each piece of wire I made a small "V" shaped bend, and then bent the "V" perpendicular to the rest of the piece of wire. I then superglued a bat atop each of the little "V" bends. On some of the bats I bent the wings up or down a little to help give a look of them being in flight.
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| Adding glue to form the bat's 'body' |
After the super glue dried, and the bats were firmly affixed to their stand, I ran a small blob of thick Tacky glue down the length of the body to help give it dimension and make it look less like a perfectly flat surface.
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| Gluing the bundled wires onto a steel fender washer. Shown with a 25mm figure for scale. |
After the Tacky glue 'bodies' dried, my next step was to twist all the wires together at the loose end, staggering the lengths a little, to form a little bundled section abut an inch long. I then made a right angle bend in this bundled portion and formed the bent part into a small semi circle to make a base to glue onto a washer.
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| After a flat black primer coat. |
I then primed the whole thing flat black. After the primer dried I drybrushed the bats with gray, and added two little red dot eyes on each.
After the painting was done I then flocked the base and finally gave the whole thing a protective spray with Testor's Dullcote.
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A shot of the finished Giant Bat Swarm. Shown with a 25mm figure
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I'm pleased with how this base turned out. I think in the future I might add a couple more bats to each base to make a slightly more dense swarm.
