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Monday 9 May 2011

Trees – quick and easy

I’ve been quite happy with the trees I threw together for my new board.

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they are a little fragile, but I can suggest several ways to reinforce them for those who either play more than me, or with younger fingers :)

This most recent style of tree was stolen from the world of model railways, and involves using SeaMoss (or SeaFoam) as an armature.

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This is what you will need.

A suitably shaped sprig of sea moss for each tree. If you want stronger trees or larger trees you can combine sprigs and bind the trunks with wire.

Glue – watered PVA is fine, wood glue is better

Foliage. you can use anything, foam flock, leaves, but I've found the best in noch foliage.

A base – I’m using a mini base here, but Drax has put me onto some wooden discs I can nab from ebay, so I’ll likely move to those as plastic is a little light for these.

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you’ll need to drill out the base and glue the stem of the trunk in place

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This should give you a workable armature. you could paint this, but as its a natural product it has a colour variation already, and I promised you quick and easy

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Base the tree as normal, you can paint this later to match your table

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Give it a good dunking in glue. the more glue you get into the armature, the more the foliage will stick

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I use a max of dunking into the foliage and sprinkling on, mainly because i need to ensure I get leaves in natural looking places, and because leaves usually face up and out.

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There we have it, rinse repeat and paint the bases for an instant forest.

Hope that was of use, thanks for dropping by!

6 comments:

  1. Loving the autumn/fall style foliage effect.

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  2. Use 1p, 1 EuroCent or 1 Cent coins superglued on the base underside for stability - cheaper than buying anything else, literally costs pennies!

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  3. Where do you get the Sea Moss ... besides the obvious answer of in the sea ...

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  4. Wonderful trees. So much more for your Stormdude to run over.

    You can find bags of washers that fit inside round 25mm bases - heavier than the pennies (although "literally costs pennies" is worth it for line alone). I would add that going to a DIY shop and trawling through the bags of trade washers until you find the 200 you're looking for might only pay (in economic terms) if you were going there anyway.

    Mine were Gibbs & Dandy M10 BZP Heavy Steel Washers. £7 for 100. But they are very heavy, much heavier than you'd get with (for instance) multiple pennies.

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  5. Thanks everyone

    Good t sip on the coins! I'll pop some in the bases of those I've already done.

    Likewise Zzzz, I didmtry to find some washers at home base but they were small and costly, I intended to use them as the whole base, so in wanted large ones. I may look on screw fix at some point.

    Jmezz, it's actually a plant you could grow and dry yourself, but I got mine from Www.internationalmodels.net that said lots of railway terrain shops stock it.

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