Urban Bases Part 2: Painting

So after a forced hobby break of nearly a month I was itching to get going again, especially to try out my airbrush for the first time. As a result I thought I'd finish off the jet bike base I'd started a while ago (can be found here). Here's the finished product (the bases at least) hope you like them, I'd really appreciate any feed back on them before I roll them out across an entire army.

Painting the bases:

• First I primed the base with Vallejo black primer (brilliant stuff by the way I'll be doing a review of sorts of a lot of the stuff I used today tomorrow) masking off the flying stem with tape.
• Then I sprayed the entire thing with Chardon Granite.
• Using a zenithal like highlighting motion I used the airbrush to apply a thin layer of scorched brown over the dirt and codex grey over the rocks, making sure you could see the first layer showing through.
• I then dry brushed all the dirt with snakebite leather before making a wash that was about 1:1:3 catachan green, devlan mud and water and blasting it through the airbrush covering the whole thing. This toned all the paint down and gave it a more natural tinge, blending the separate parts together and making the overall appearance more interesting.
• Time for another round of dry brushing, this time I gave the dirt a pass of commando khaki and the rocks a 1:1 codex grey and skull white before hitting the entire thing with the wash again, moving it into the cracks of the rocks and off the smooth areas to avoid pooling and achieve a more realistic effect.
• To do the metal I just painted it bolt gun metal, hit it with the green wash then badab black, quickly dry brushed it bolt gun again and then washed the cracks with thinned bestial brown to simulate brown.

Static grass:

This was the first time I had properly used static grass on a base but I had no difficulty what so ever and I think it really made the base. To apply it I just painted on a blob of static grass, then using tweezers a pushed on a huge clump of the stuff before tipping the whole thing upside down and tapping the excess off.

All in all it didn't take me too long, and I could have sped up the process in parts, I just really wanted to use the airbrush. I think the whole thing looks really good though the rocks could be improved on, but I guess that's just practise.