Treesperiments–part one

In an earlier post I showed off some of the terrain I’ve been dabbling with, allbeit in a slightly cryptic and not very “here is my terrain” kind of way… I’m going to try and rectify that in a few forthcoming posts. so let’s use this one to talk about trees.

I was very happy with the aesthetic of the trees I built last time out, but repeated use has seen my initial concern about their fragility morph into their almost total destruction. so I set about trying to find a new way.

first let me say that I’m not a fan of the overly plasticy warhammer wood.. on a themed table of cartoony warhammer stuff it looks great, like you’re playing warcraft for real but when aiming for a bit more veracity it’s harder to see it fitting in.

Model railroad guys seem to do okay, so what I did was buy some woodland scenics tree armatures and a few types of foliage and set about making trees.

The armatures arrive flat, and with their own base plugs, so after some twisting to make them look a bit more “tree-ey” I glued them down to some old tree stand terrain I had already – my “dead forest” was in dire need of refreshing having not been used for some time, so it got repurposed.

voila, trees glued to wood. awesome. a little filler (spackle) was applied next to blend in the trees and some cast rocks glued down as accents, along with the odd dead twig to stand as a broken tree.

spackle applied..

I’ve opted to use three different types of foliage here, partly to test them out and also for variety, I have “bushes” which is a quite dense foam clump product; “underbrush” which is a similar, but looser product and “fine leaf foliage” which seemed to be something akin to the seamoss from my earlier attempt at tree making, but painted and flocked..

Next I used woodland scenics hob-e-tack.. and yes it really is worth buying the wait time is important too. basically, glob it on, wait fifteen minutes or so, and youll have the stickiest tree armatures in Christendom, just ripe for dunking in your flocking of choice.

in the wait-time I applied several types of ground cover and static grass to the bases for the tree stands.

This is the overall result, a reasonably satisfying set of trees and bases to use as woods in games..
I was however not totally happy, and set about refining the process.. look to treesperiments part 2 coming soon!

I hope that had some value to any budding arbourialists.. coming up next, some more terrain, and some painted stuff.. hopefully..