How to - making bamboo groves

Is it a grove of bamboo, or a stand, or a clump? Whatever it is, this is what I was trying to model:

The photos are courtesy of Google Street View, the first one is in Chania and the second, Perivolia, both on the island of Crete. (Spot the agave cactus in the first shot - see my how to guide for making those).

A search on Amazon turned up some useful-looking plastic plants. There are 100 pieces in four different sizes for under a tenner, so great value. The downside is that they are plastic and bright green, so need a bit of work, but that is sort of the object of my blog. ;-)

I made lots of small bases using offcuts of 2mm MDF that came with tree bases from 4Ground.  Once you have popped out the tree bases from the rectangular piece of MDF, you are left with the "waste".  

I used some small (and very sharp and very strong) gardening pruning snips to cut the MDF into some interesting and non-regular shapes.  Then I drilled some holes using a 2mm drill bit so that I could poke the stalk of the plastic plants into them, once the bases had been prepared.

Before inserting the plants into the base, I roughly coated them in a thin-ish layer of generic polyfilla and immediately dipped them into my Mediterranean basing sand. The example below shows a couple of larger stones stuck into the polyfilla prior to applying the sand. You can just about make out some of holes on the right.

This is what they look like immediately after dipping. The polyfilla does not hold the sand particularly well, but allows enough to stick on until it gets sealed with diluted PVA glue, applied using a spray bottle.

Here are several bases drying in the garden after a liberal coating of diluted PVA. All of the bases below came from the offcuts of a single 4Ground large tree base.  They need a couple of hours to make sure that they are fully dry before moving to the next step.  Once fully dried, I painted the exposed edges of the bases with a pale terracotta paint, dipped in sand and re-sealed. It is worth the extra effort of spraying a couple of times; they are bullet-proof afterwards and will stand up to a lot of handling on the gaming table. 

Whilst they are drying, you can get on with covering over the green plastic plants with a more suitable colour. I started off using a spray paint from Army Painter (do they actually put any pigment into their spray cans?) and then started over after buying some good quality spray paints from Humbrol. I used three colours from their acrylic range: Desert Tan, Beige Green and Desert Yellow. Be aware that the actual colours look nothing like the coloured labels on the lids. The Humbrol paint is far superior to any other spray paints that I have used. My only small criticism is that they took 10 days to fulfil my order.

After a bit of experimentation, I found that a good all-over base colour was the Desert Tan, followed by a light dusting of Beige Green and then a very light dusting of Desert Yellow. There is tons of pigment in the Humbrol cans, so you hardly need to spray anything to get a good covering.  Less is certainly more in this case.

I used a small offcut of insulation foam and poked a load of holes in it to create a temporary base to stand each plant in whilst spraying. The photo above shows the base colour of Desert Tan.  The photo below shows the second coat (Beige Green), which is a very pale, minty green colour.

To finish them off, a really quick squirt of Desert Yellow created some highlights. The spray paint dries in less than minute, so this step is really quick.

Each plant was then poked through the pre-drilled hole in the base - you may need to re-drill a couple from the underside of the base if you have inadvertently filled in a hole.  Do this before you start poking the stems into the holes.

Poke the plants into all the pre-drilled holes and then apply a little dab of superglue from the underside to hold them in place.  Once the superglue has dried, I used some side-cutters to snip off the excess length of the plant from the underside of the base so that they sit flush on the table top.

This is what they look like on the gaming table.