Happy Seppuku manufacture textured stamps for creating you own textured bases. If you’ve ever dreamed of having something more exciting than sand on your bases, but are put off by the expense of cast bases then these might be of interest to you. They are pretty simple to use, in fact there are just three steps:
- Take a standard flat topped or recessed base and put some molding clay or putty on top.
- Take the stamp and press the base into the textured stamp.
- Leave the stamp for a little while and allow to harden (bases can harden while on the stamp or can be removed from them.
Happy Seppuku have been manufacturing these for a while. However to enable them to improve the range, as well as rework a number of their existing bases they ran a successful Kickstarter a while back. Well I got these into my hands a little while back, I’ve now had a chance to play and figured I’d do a quick little write up.
Happy Seppuku produce two kinds of stamps, each are 13cm by 8cm (5″ x 7″):
- Regular Stamps that are covered in the same texture across the entire surface. There are small variations in the different areas, particularly for the irregular textures while the regular ones are pretty uniform. Happy Seppuku have used digital processes to produce these moulds so the regular textures are very regular.
- Accent Stamps that have various little (and not so little) items all from a theme that can add some character and variability to your bases.
I picked up 4 regular stamps (Standard Brick, Square Tiles, Cobblestones & wood), 2 accent stamps (Brick Edges & Sewers/Grates) and the sample stamp. These were reasonably priced at $65 USD delivered to my door in Australia, the prices have gone up since the Kickstarter ended, but they’re still pretty reasonable at $12.50 USD per stamp.
I won’t put up pictures of the individual stamps, their website has plenty. However, I did make a couple of test casts to see how they looked. Below you can see a wood plank base, a cobblestone base and a couple of sewers and grates. These were my first efforts and came out quite well in absolutely no time.
I’m quite happy with how they turned out, the detail is really good and it’s quite easy and cheap. For punching out a bunch of bases I think the results are quite good. Detail is not quite as crisp as can be achieved with resin bases, but in terms of price for large units this is much more affordable.
Now bases is one thing, and what the intended purpose is. However, they are quite big and one of the purposes I had always had in mind was to use them as stamps to create textures for terrain items. With that in mind I took a ruined WW2 building I was working on, mixed up a good sized chunk of green stuff and let loose. The results were just what I was hoping for, it took me a couple of tries to line it up right, but in about 1/2 and hour I had added texture to the entire footpath by just using the stamp twice.
Overall I’ve been really impressed with these stamps. I’ve only had one minor issue, due to the amount of production being done for the Kickstarter it looks like quality control got a little slack. As a result a few poorly cast stamps came out. I got one of these in my Brick Accent stamp. Now it’s not too bad as the detail is there it’s just shallow and if it was on a regular stamp you wouldn’t really mind as it just adds some character to certain areas. However, with the accent stamps you don’t have a lot of each texture so what is character on a large scale becomes a repetitive obvious flaw when repeated every time the stamp is used.
However, a quick email to Happy Seppuku and they were more than happy to send out a replacement with no issue at all. So hats off to them; miscasts are a part of life, but it’s great to see them responding quickly and pleasantly to make things right.
