One of the most annoying things about the way I based my miniatures so far is painting the sand. Covering the base in PVA and then sprinkling sand on is quite fast. Then painting the sand takes forever. The total surface area to cover is huge compared to the base area, getting into all the nooks and crannies is difficult and requires at least two coats, and all the time you need to pay attention to not get paint on the miniature. Painting the base in the base colour first helps a bit, as missed parts with the sand don't stand out as much, but still.
So I tried a new approach: I painted the sand before glueing it to the base.
I mixed a batch of my base color and thinned it down slightly, had some sand in a bag, poured the paint in, and massaged the bag until all the sand was coloured. Then I spread the sand on baking paper to let it dry.
This took like two days, in between I mixed and broke up the sand (the drying colour created larger blobs and plates of sand) several times. Finally, I broke it up one last time and put it into containers.
I then glued the sand onto the bases like I would with unpainted sand, only that I was done with that.
When the glue was dry, I applied scenic glue on top with a pipette to seal the sand in.
Ready for drybrushing. And much faster than painting the sand after glueing it to the base.
The sand is slightly lighter that the base color, need to work on the mixing ratio or thickness of the colour when dying the sand, but otherwise I think I will use this way going forward.