Trees, trees and more trees… oh and some bamboo!
I didn’t get in a game this weekend as I had lots of interruptions so I decided to spend a little of the free time I had making and repairing some trees.
First up was a repair job on some Woodland Scenics trees I had made a while back and thought that they looked ok, but I found that every time I touched them the foliage started to drop off which was very annoying and messy.
These trees came as bendable armatures averaging between 4” and 5” in height which you have to bend into shape and then add the foliage, the problem was they look a little flat and the foliage started to fall off almost immediately.
I found that the armatures could not be bent or twisted into pleasing tree shapes no matter how I bent them, I could not make the trees look “full”
I know these trees are meant for a train lay-out but I have seen them used on train lay-outs and they have looked fine but on the wargaming table I wasn’t really happy with them.
So first thing I did was to cut all the branches off of one armature and then glued these onto the other trees giving them a fuller rounder look.
I then got to try out my new hot-glue gun ( my old one decided to stop working a while ago ) you would normally use the Woodland Scenics Hob-e-Tac glue, but that is not great for wargaming scenery as it remains tacky and to be honest it doesn’t hold the foliage firmly enough to allow the trees to be handled on a wargames table.
So adding the foliage using the hot-glue made things a lot easier ( even if it burns your fingers a lot! ) and it definitely holds the foliage well.
Some of the trees are still a little “flat” but I do have more spare armatures so that I can add a few more branches where needed.
The tanks in the pictures are just a couple of my 20mm Germans just to give an idea of size.
Next up was some palm trees I had brought from China about two years ago!! These have been sitting in their bag in a cupboard all this time, I had wanted them to use with my 15mm sci-fi stuff as the rest of my scenery is built with a desert theme, and the figures are also painted for a desert.
Well like some of my other projects it just never got done but as I had the new hot-glue gun it was a good time to get them on some bases.
These little trees are great and were extremely cheap and will not need much to make them look good on the battlefield, maybe even just a spray with matt varnish to take off the shine but even that may not be that necessary.
And just to give an idea of the scale of these trees the tanks are from my 15mm WW2 stuff… I am still thinking about using all my 15mm WW2 / WW3 tanks and vehicles with my 15mm sci-fi troops as I find the 15mm sci-fi vehicles are a little bit expensive compared to the “Flames of War” and “Team Yankee” ones.
Also when I brought those palm trees from China I added to the order a pack of Bamboo as well, again these have sat in their bag next to the palm trees and have been almost forgotten about.
I had originally got them to use with my Japanese scenery for some sort of rural Japanese skirmish game, I had played “Test of Honor” a few times and liked it but again haven’t really progressed along the actual finishing all my scenery for my own games… I have not even painted any of the figures yet!!
Last Christmas I got the Osprey rules “Ronin” and have been wanting to play it since then so the trees making got me in the mood to get the bamboo started as well.
So I quickly cut a few bases for some nice neat lines of bamboo which can be used as propagated field at the edge of a village or even maybe as a living fence!!
The buildings are some that I managed to get hold of a while back, they are for 28mm figures and are all scratch build and look really good I just need to finish them off ( they are on my list of things to do! )
The next thing I need to do with all these trees ( and Bamboo ) is to finish off their bases, once these are done I will hopefully get some games in using them and will put some pictures up on here.