How To - Making olive trees

I wrote up a how-to guide a couple of months ago on how I made conifer trees for my winter gaming table using the sort of materials that you can find in most DIY stores (or Amazon). I had always planned to write up a guide on how I had created olive trees, so here it is...

On every Mediterranean holiday I've ever been on, I've dragged the family around the countryside, so that I can take photos of old buildings, rickety doors, cobbled streets, pantile roof tops, bridges, trees, hedges, vineyards and, of course, olive groves.

Materials for making the trunk and base

• Tree armatures - I used deciduous armatures from Woodland Scenics
• Ready-mixed wall filler - B&Q in the UK has cheap filler
• Primer spray paint - I use grey car primer from Halfords for pretty much everything that needs priming
  
• Dark brown paint - due to the small quantity required, I used Vallejo German Cam Black Brown (Model Color #70822)
• Light grey/green (olive!) paint - Vallejo Model Color #70886 Green Grey
• Highlight paint - Vallejo #70821 German Cam Beige
  
• Some basing materials e.g. PVA glue, fine sand, flock

Materials for making the canopy

• Foam used in kitchen extractors like this
• PVA glue
• Some green (ideally olive coloured) paint - I used some tester pots from B&Q
  
• A small bucket
• Spray adhesive like this
  
• Some gloves to keep your hands clean!
• Woodland Scenics Mid Green Coarse Turf

The Method

Bend the tree armatures into shapes that look like the twisted shapes that olive tree trunks grow like, then liberally apply some of the wall filler to the lower half of the tree i.e. up to where the lowest branches start.  Many olive trees, especially older trees have very twisted, thick, gnarled trunks, so experiment with making some tree trunks thicker than others. Don't worry too much about making a mess at this stage and don't bother to smooth the filler out.  If you want to represent younger trees, then don't apply so much filler and keep the trunk a bit thinner.

Leave it for half an hour or so until the filler starts to dry out a little, but not so much that it is starting to harden.  You'll need to use your judgment here: drying time depends on how warm and humid the air is and how much filler you have applied. Once the filler is starting to dry, use some sort of implement (a knife, a toothpick, a spatula) to press some shapes into the filler to create a roughed up surface.  One of the defining characteristics of olive trees is the unusual shape and texture of the trunks.

Once it has fully dried, give it a spray with the primer. Once your primer has dried, then slap on the dark brown or black paint and make sure you get it into all the crevices; leave it to dry. The effect we are aiming for on the finished tree is a high colour contrast between being very dark in the crevices and much lighter on the outer surface.  Once the dark base colour has dried, liberally dry brush the khaki coloured paint over the top. Once that has dried, then lightly dry brush the lighter highlight colour onto the top most ridges of the trunk.

Next, it gets a bit messy! To make the leaves and tree canopy, I used the type of foam material that you put into older style cooker hoods/extractors (see the link above).  Cut the large foam sheet into some more manageable size (about 6 inches) and then start to tease and tear it apart so that you end up with thinner sheets.

In your bucket, mix up some paint so that you have an olive colour, add some water and PVA. The approximate quantities that I used were about 100ml of paint, about 50ml of water and about 50ml of PVA glue. Give it a good stir: the consistency you are aiming for should be like milk, so if it is too thick, then add a little more water. One thing I learnt was the paint colour will become lighter due to dilution, so if that happens then you can add a bit more paint into bucket after you have added the foam sheets. You don't need to be too scientific with the quantities!

Get your rubber gloves on and then shove the foam sheets into the bucket and give them a good squeeze to get the paint mixture into all the fibres. When you take the foam out, squeeze it well to remove as much moisture as possible and then leave it somewhere to dry. I left mine outside to dry in the summer sun. ;-)

I experimented by using more/less quantities of different coloured paint with every few foam sheets that were dipped in the paint, so that I ended up with various shades of green: some darker and some lighter. This is useful for the next step.

Once the foam sheets have fully dried out, we can start making the canopies for the trees. Take one of the sheets and then tease or tear the fibres apart so that you have large "pinches" of loose fibres. I took different coloured sheets and then mixed up some fibres to create different shades and add a bit more variety.

Without applying any glue just yet, stretch some of these tufts over the branches of the armature. Repeat this until all the branches have a very loose covering of fibres then (without breathing any in - wear a mask and do perform this step in a well-ventilated place!) spray some adhesive over the canopy. Don't spray too much.

Be careful not to overdo it with the number of fibres you use, and also be sparing with the spray adhesive, because when you apply the spray adhesive, it binds the fibres together and they thicken up to created a thick matted surface.  I ended up pulling apart my first attempt and starting over.  Less really is more at this stage. The looser the fibres are, then the more it looks like the canopy of an olive tree IMHO.  The effect that I was aiming for was to have some "air" in the leaf canopy so that you can see some of the branches. Here's what the finished article looks like.

Looking at a close-up, you can see that the fibres have a lot of space in them. Zooming in this close shows a lot of loose fibres, though when they are on the gaming table you really cannot see this level of detail.

And here is what the trees look like in context on a gaming table.

More photos like this are included in an earlier blog post I wrote about a scenario set in Crete.

EDIT: Since first posting this article, I have gone back to my olive trees and added some Coarse Turf from Woodlands Scenics, which is a far better finish than the loose fibres and simulates the leaf canopy more realistically. 

The technique for applying the coarse turf is similar to that noted above: spray with the spray adhesive and then sprinkle the coarse turf over it. Seal again with another spray of the spray glue and leave the tree somewhere for the glue to go off. About an hour later, I then gave the canopy a good soaking in diluted PVA glue from a spray bottle, which creates a really good solid finish and prevents the turf from falling off i.e. it makes it more robust, but without losing any of the definition.

I also rebased the trees onto larger bases to make them stand up on the table more easily. The picture below shows the original Woodlands Scenic tree armature base glued onto a 40mm MDF base from 4Ground, then covered in sand and a couple of small tufts.