An old school hobbying question: did everyone always base their miniatures "like that" in the 80s and 90s, at least for warhammer and adjacent properties? Whenever I see old photos of minis or see someone painting minis to early Warhammer specifications, they always follow a very narrow design sensibility for basing: covered in either sand or flock, painted to resemble a field of grass, optionally given tufts of model grass to represent taller foliage, model standing straight-on. Occasionally it's dry or yellowed, but pretty much always to that formula. No shade whatsoever there - a lot of these pieces are beautiful and it's a system that works in the absence of a global fantasy miniatures market - but I know that a lot of these hobbyists and professionals were skilled and creative enough to do whatever they want. Did nearly all minis look like they were standing on the grassy knoll that killed JFK or am I just not looking hard enough?
I never used the bright green sand method. I always compared it to standing on a perfectly manicured putting green. It just didn't look like a battlefield to me. In the 90s I used a mix of natural sand and gravel with sparse additions of mixed green and brown flocking, with a medium green or tan rim, to look like rougher ground that might have been trampled by troops. To this day I still prefer a relatively low profile to the texture material, and I won't perch a model for gaming on a tall plinth of rubble like you see in painting contests.
I went down the rabbit hole (here, here, and here) to find the specific origin of the Goblin Green bases drybrushed Sunburst Yellow that every YouTuber insists was the oldhammer method, but it really wasn't a universal thing through the eras of Rogue Trader and Warhammer Fantasy 3e. The earliest I can find it explicitly spelled out is the 16-page 1989 White Dwarf Presents: Citadel Miniatures Painting Guide:
Here Woodland Green is the main color and Goblin Green is one of two shading options, and the rim has been left black.
Plain green bases match plain green felt tablecloths better, especially when photographing for publication That's probably why GW gradually started showing more examples of similar simple green bases through the late 80s and early 90s. Even then the instructions weren't always consistent. As late as the 1993 Warhammer Fantasy 4th ed rulebook Mike McVey says to use sand this way but to paint and drybrush simply "green."
(Update: Found the even simpler 'Goblin Green drybrushed Sunburst Yellow' method in Mike McVey's 1992 update to this painting guide. John Blanche introduced the 1989 version above.)
