T34 platoon on the march

I have now finished painting six Russian T34/76s (for the work-in-progress photos and description of the paint colours used etc, read about it here). 

Here are a few pics of the finished platoon advancing through a forest on the Eastern Front.

I wrote a how-to guide on how I created the trees a little while ago; if you are interested you can read about the method and materials here.

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.

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.

Scale of trees

I thought I would upload a couple of photos to specifically show the scale of the trees that I made in an earlier post.  The lighter green tree in the left of the photo was purchased from 4Ground (though sadly they have stopped retailing them - I must ask Ben why that is) and is about 4-6" tall. The other four trees are from the batch made in my how-to guide.  There is a 28mm figure in the foreground to show the scale relative to the size that I game in.

There was some discussion on TMP about the cost of making trees. I agree that there are other methods (perhaps at a lower cost per unit) for putting some trees on the table, such as the ready-made ones as sold by Woodland Scenics.  For me, there are some other considerations...

1. I quite enjoy making terrain so don't mind putting in a bit of extra effort and spending a little bit extra.
2. Building your own trees means that you can choose what size and shape they are - this is where I think that it does become cost-effective to make your own. The largest trees I made are approx. 12" tall, but they are all individually sized between ~4" and 12", so there is lots of variety.  
3. The shapes of the home made ones are also irregular, so IMHO look more realistic.
4. By being able to build to bigger scale, I think that it also represents the real size of trees in relation to other models on the gaming table, for example, vehicles and especially buildings. Many conifers are taller than houses, so I wanted to represent this on my gaming table.

I have nothing against store-bought trees - I actually have quite a few on the same table, which I think adds to the overall "look".

The shot above shows the scale of a 4-6" tree (left of the house) and the comparative size of my larger home-made conifers.

Planting a forest

Planting a Forest  - a How To Guide

Every good wargaming table needs some height to give it that authentic battlefield look; I really don't like flat, uniform table tops, so I try to find ways of adding a bit of real world texture to my gaming tables. One easy way to do that, which also suits nearly every table (I mostly game WW2) are trees.

Obviously, there are other things to spread around your table such as buildings, but they can be very theatre specific; even in northern Europe, the houses in France have a noticeably different style to the houses in Holland, Germany, Italy or even Denmark.  Even walls and hedges can sometimes be a bit too specific to certain parts of the world, whereas you can see the same species of trees (at 28mm scale anyway - I defy anyone to tell the difference between many varieties of model trees at that scale) around most of the world.  Well, certainly across all of Europe and the Mediterranean and even into North Africa and Russia.  ;-)  That covers most of the theatres of WW2, certainly enough for my gaming enjoyment.

One such variety of versatile tree (for terrain-makers at 28mm scale) is the conifer. There are spruce, fir, pine, larch and cedar… and perhaps some more?  The colours and shapes do vary slightly, but the general shape is the same.  Thankfully, for the purposes of terrain-building, we can create generic conifers at a pretty low cost and fill out a table.  Many deciduous varieties are also fairly similar. This blog has some pretty useful source material. Here's a pic of my winter table, which I blogged about a couple of weeks ago.  Most of the trees in this photo were made for a total of about £20, which is less than a quid per tree.

Some of the non-coniferous trees came from my good friends over at 4Ground, though I don't think they sell trees any more.

How to Make Conifers

The trees are made from something called Hedgehog Gutter Brush, which you lay into your gutters to stop leaves and moss from blocking them up.  It also is really great for cutting into tree shapes. I purchased a 4 metre length from Amazon. It comes in a roll like this...

When creating my trees, I cut the brush into different lengths (rather than the uniform height that the trees you buy usually are), which ranged from about 10cm up to 30cm.  You need some heavy duty wire cutters to snip the metal wire.

Once you have snipped the wire brush into lots of different lengths, you then need to trim the black plastic brush into a tree shape. Get yourself a decent, comfortable pair of scissors to do this. When trimming the brush, rotate it and trim at a angle.  Keep rotating and cutting until you've gone all the way round your new tree.  I tend to rotate it by 360 degrees a few times and keep trimming until I am happy with the shape.  It doesn't need to be completely symmetrical, in fact, I think if there is a bit of asymmetry about it, it tends to look better.

You'll notice from the photo above that I have pulled the brush strands out from the bottom to create the trunk.  I've pulled out about 2cm.

Keep trimming all your trees until they are complete. To stop more of the bristles from falling out from either the bottom or top of your newly cut tree, use a tiny amount of hot glue from a hot glue gun on both the top and bottom of your tree.

Next, it gets a bit messy!  In an old tub of PVA glue, I filled it with about 25% PVA and 75% water and gave it a good mix.

Ensure that you have somewhere where you don't mind making a mess...trust me on this!  Top tip though: don't do it outside on a windy day if you want to keep most of your flock.

Dip one of your trees into the PVA tub ensuring that it is getting it fully coated with the PVA/water mix.  Lift it out and let the excess glue drip back into tub before transferring your glue-laden tree into a large tub of flock; sit the two tubs side-by-side to cut down on the mess.  I used dark green coarse turf from Woodland Scenics.

Generously pour more coarse turf over the tree, turning it as you do so, then lift it out of the tub and give it a gentle shake over your turf tub (or a tray) to remove (and recover) most of the excess turf.  Don't be afraid to pour on lots of the turf material - you will recover most of it back in the tub/tray placed beneath it.  When you think that the glue has soaked up as much turf as it can take, transfer your tree to somewhere to dry for a few hours.  I used a piece of foam with some pre-made holes so that the trees were upright and none of the flock/turf was in contact with anything else whilst it was drying.  Be aware that even though you think that the glue has all been soaked up, it hasn't: you are going to have watery glue running down the trees until it starts to dry.  Next time I might experiment with a thicker glue mixture - it needs to be runny enough to coat all the bristles though, so just bear that in mind.

I forgot take photos during the gluing/flocking stage because I got plenty of glue and flock stuck on me.  A pair of nitrile, powder-free gloves from Screwfix are just the job for keeping the colour from permeating your skin. 

Looking back at that photo, it looks like 4 metres of the hedgehog brush made about 30 trees of different sizes. If you are gaming in 15mm, then I guess that you could make even more. Once dry, the PVA does not fix the flock in place particularly well, so you will find that every time you handle bits will fall off, but there is a simple solution to that.  

Do this next bit outside and I would also recommend that you WEAR A DUST MASK to avoid inhaling any glue. Spray the trees one at a time with a spray adhesive, rotating them as you spray to get an even coating of the glue.  Try and get the spray deep into the "branches", but don't go too mad otherwise you'll get through your can of glue pretty quickly.  

I then dusted my trees with a sprinkling of lighter coloured Earth Blend turf from Woodland Scenics, just to highlight the outer leaves of the tree; this also absorbs some of the spray adhesive.  Remember to give it a shake to spread the sprinkled turf across all the bristles and to penetrate into the tree a bit.  Once sprayed and highlighted, place the tree back in the place you used to stand it up and let the adhesive harden; I left mine overnight.  If you don't want to use a lighter colour, then the same dark green is just as good.

The turf should now be fixed to the bristles of the hedgehog brush really well and will stand up to lots of handling on the gaming table or transporting around. Once you have completed this, all that is left to do is mount them onto some bases. 40mm MDF bases work well, which I used for individual trees, but I also glued a couple of trees together onto larger, irregular shaped bases that I had found somewhere.

Use a hot glue gun to place a nice, big dab of glue onto the centre of your base. Twist the bottom of the brush wire into the glue and wiggle it around to create a good point of contact; use a lolly stick or coffee stirrer to smooth the glue up the trunk of the tree, and then leave for a few seconds while it hardens.  Place it to one side before doing the next tree.

Once you have glued all your trees to their bases, get some paint and paint the MDF base and up the trunk of the tree.  I've got several pots of paint from B&Q that I use for various terrain projects.  Any sort of brown will do, though I used Dulux Espresso Shot here.  I wasn't too fastidious in painting the tree trunk because you cannot actually see them once you've got them based up and on the gaming table.  If you created a longer trunk than the 15-20mm trunks that I did, then you might decide to pay a bit more attention to modelling the trunks or risk seeing the twisted wire.

I sprinkled a bit of grit and sand onto the paint to give it some more texture.  Once dry, I then used some of the 25% PVA/75% water and painted this onto the base, then dipped into a tub of flock to finish the bases off.  Here is what a finished tree looks like, though I didn't match the base of this particular tree to that part of the gaming table!

Materials & Tools

The things that I used to make about 30 trees were:

• 4 metres of hedgehog gutter brush
• PVA glue and water
• Woodland Scenics dark green coarse turf (and maybe a lighter colour for highlighting)
• Spray adhesive
• Something to base the trees on
• Hot glue sticks
• Brown paint
• Sand or grit
• Some flock material

• Heavy duty wire cutters
• Good pair of scissors
• Latex gloves
• Hot glue gun
• Lolly sticks or coffee stirrers

Like Trees?

For those of you interested in making trees and vegetation, I have written a few more blog posts regarding how I made olive trees, agave cactus and low, scrubby vegetation for a Mediterranean or desert-themed gaming table. I'm planning on doing a piece about Aleppo pine trees soon too. 

I hope this gives you some ideas and inspiration; share your thoughts in the comments below.