Now here I have to say that when all is said and done the lichen trees from model-railroading are probably good enough except for the most persnickety gamer. They are relatively realistic, not too far out of scale for 25mm or 15mm (depending if you use HO or N gauge) and relatively cheap. At least they are cheap enough if you can cost your time to make them. If however you are not convinced, read on.
Now first of all let's get real... you are, in wargames, not terribly interested in the specific genus of trees, so we are not going to be getting into the difference between a Red Oak and a White Oak here. All you are really interested in is the general form of trees, and this relates to the area your games are in. This means either conifers (pine, spruce, fir,) or deciduous (maple, oak, ash, etc.) or palm trees if you are in the desert or tropical regions. If you are interested in alien vegetative life forms for a science fiction game then use your imagination but this article will be of no help, and by the way, if you are interested in palm trees, I can't help you either. These things are so complicated to make, that the best thing is to go to a bakery supply place and try and find the small trees they stick on top of cakes.
Trees really have two parts, the trunks, and the stuff hanging off them. Trunks for the conifers are usually long, straight and relatively slender given the volume of the tree. Trunks for deciduous trees can range from relatively thin and slender (like beech etc...) to thick gnarly massive things like old oaks and ash. Conifers almost never have bifurcated trunks and always have lots of small branches off the center spine, while deciduous trees the trunk breaks into two or three massive limbs every six feet or so, which then themselves divide into smaller branches etc.
For conifers the best source of trunks is chopsticks. The wood used for them is very very strong and durable, and is just about the right size for 25mm conifers of massive size, so if you like Chinese food, make sure you ask for chopsticks the next time you're out at a restaurant and make sure all your friends do. Then carefully collect them. After enjoying several oriental repasts you will have enough for a veritable forest! If this is not an option or you wish smaller trees, go to the local hardware store and get about a dozen maple dowels of 1/4" diameter or slightly smaller. Don't go too small or you will be back to the problem of fragility once again. Trim the dowels (or the chopsticks) to the lengths you want for your trees.
Trunks for deciduous trees are more difficult. Woodland Scenics make a nice range of die-cast trunks, but being made of lead or pewter, these tend to be a little heavy, and it gets expensive at $4.00 for two or three trunks. Some gamers use old BX cable wire stripped and twisted together and smeared over with spackling or wood working putty, but I find that method as they never put enough on it and you can always see the wires underneath, and it does not make a realistic shape for the tree, and you cannot bend and arch them as you wish.
I will give you two ways to make the trunks. The first way is to get from a modeling store some plastic styrene tubing. This stuff is made by a company called Plas-Struct. This is sold in all sorts of sizes and lengths, but generally anything from 3/8" (for big massive trees) to 1/8 for small light ones, will do. Although the tubing is not as cheap as purloined chop-sticks, it does have several advantages. In the first place, because of its physical construction as a tube, it is very flexible and immensely strong. You can't break it easily and this is a big advantage with agitated gamers about! The second is that it is styrene and you can use common modeling glue on it like Testors. The third, and by no means the least, is that being plastic it can easily be softened by heat and bent and twisted into any shape you wish. In the illustration shown all I simply did was immerse the part of the tubing in boiling water for a moment or so. This softened it enough so I could bend and twist it. You can use a small torch too, but you have to be more careful! Too much heat will scorch or deform the tube too much, change its chemical composition so it's no longer pliable and flexible, or worse, set it on fire with disastrous results for your modeling table, and perhaps your entire house as well!
Once the plastic "sets" it is just as hard as it was before and just as durable. In the illustration shown I took one large "trunk" section and then broke it up into one slightly smaller sub-trunk section and two branches. These were secured first with dots of styrene, and then by stuffing carpenters putty into the joint. Once this sets it keeps it tight and makes a good joint. Once this is done and thoroughly dry, take some fine sandpaper and roughen up the surface of the tree and branches, and then smear the carpenters putty over the outside of the tubing and the branches. Make it smooth as you can, and keep it as thin as you can. Once again, the best tools to do this are your fingers. When this dries, you can score it lightly with an old fork or a few dentist picks or even an old pin, to show the ridges in the bark.
The second method to make a deciduous trunk is to take take galvanized picture hanging wire and cut about six sections 8" long. Lightly twist these together to form the trunk, and have some sections branching off here and there to make the branches. This is good for the major trunk, but what about the branches? For this I use old BX wire. You probably have a few dozen yards of this gathering dust out in the garage, and if not then regular solid household wire can be bought cheap enough. I use braided wire now, but be careful! It is a lot harder to work than solid wire, and although it is more realistic, it tends to be more fragile. Take the wire and strip off all the insulation down to the bare copper. This forms the basic stock for the branches. I use this because once again, it's strong enough to withstand rough handling yet small enough not to be out of scale! It's also much more flexible than stainless steel picture wire. Cut the wire into short lengths of about 2 to 4 inches, never more. These will be your branches for your deciduous trees.
On a deciduous tree made with the tubing, drill through the trunk and major branches in several spots and push the solid wire through it. Secure it with some putty and smooth out. You can use two-part epoxy to make the joint tighter, and so ensure the branches won't move and twist. On the other hand, if you wish you could use even smaller diameters of tubing, or small styrene rods. However, as these get smaller they become more fragile and more difficult to work with under heat. Wire can be bent cold. On the other hand it's easier to join styrene to styrene, and copper is a difficult joint to match. Once done you can spray-paint the trunk and branches with a Rustoleum rusty metal primer. It has a nice deep rich brown tone which you can then highlight with a lighter brown or let drawing ink flow into the scores and ridges. The Rustoleoum also coats the copper and makes a good base for painting and glues and adhesives.
Ok... back to the wire core deciduous trees. There is an excellent polymer material called Sculpy Clay which is available at any art store. This works well and is heat-actuated. It will soften readily into a limp putty in your hands and can be easily worked around the trunk to form the tree. KEEP IT THIN!!! Work it up through the trunk to the point where the copper wire is crimped on and work it around this joint. get it up into the branches as far as you can. By the way... watch yourself. Copper is soft, but it can still give you a nasty small puncture! Put a blob around the base and use an artist's spatula, or a dentist pick, or even a small strip of scrap metal, begin smoothing it out and laying on base branches for roots. Continue up the wire armature, filling out the tree and gradually narrowing the diameter till you get to the top.
Once done follow the directions for baking the Sculpy in the oven. The sculpy cures pretty fast if you keep it thin, and it remains slightly flexible even when dry. DO NOT OVER CURE! The one big drawback to this is that the stuff smells terrible when you bake it, so it might be a good idea to keep the windows open, the ventilator on the stove hood going full blast, and the wife out of the house for the few minutes it will take.
Now you can glue small tufts of the painted foam material onto the branches to represent clumps of leaves. This is the most difficult part. Sticking huge irregular clumps of the painted poly-foam will be quick and easy, - it can be impaled on the glue-smeared end of wire and left to dry. It will do, but it won't look truly realistic. The smaller the lump the more realistic it will look, but remember that the smaller the lump the more branches you will have to make, and the more time you will have to spend on each tree, and, of course, The more fragile it becomes, and we are back to the model railroaders dilemma. In the illustration shown I combined the solid and the braided wire on the trunk of the armature tree, opening up some of the strands to make a more realistic looking branch arrangement. The "tubing tree" on the other hand I just used "clumps." For the smaller more delicate ones I chopped up the clumps in my blender till I had a nice can full of small bits between 1/8 and 1/4 in in size. Then I brushed a slightly watered down solution of Elmers onto the branches and then drizzled the small bits of poly foam over it. I let it dry and then repeated the process where there were bare spots to get the tree shown.
To do pine trees you use basically the same methods except you use the braided wire throughout. Pine trees are either of two types with dangling branches like the Norway Spruce, or fan-like, as the firs and pines we usually use for our Christmas Tree. which has branches that look like this...
The Norway spruce is just too difficult to make. I only do the Christmas tree-type, which has its branches laying in "planes" or layers up the stalk like this. (Hmmm I see I have yielded to temptation and gotten into specific types of trees.)
To model this I take the braided wire and after it is dried in the holes in the trunk I separate the strands on both sides, laying them out in a "fan" and pushing them generally downward, curving them slightly. Then I mix a special batch of poly-foam, dyed a very dark green, and shredded up fine into a dust or into pieces no more than 1/8" in diameter, dip the tree into the watered down Elmers, and then drizzle the stuff over the tree. A lot of work, huh!
I generally use these methods only when I am making a special presentation piece, or a diorama, or a special piece of wargame terrain. Even I haven't made whole forests of them because they are just too time consuming. Maybe now the model railroad stuff doesn't look so bad!
In the last article I gave you the general way of arranging and building forests. This time I will deal with trees. As I said, trees are the most difficult to make because, the more realistic one makes them, the more fragile they are. This fragility is not only on the table top, but also in the dimension of storage, for trees take an awful beating in the box, and unless you have a lot of space in your home for nested and secured storage, they will decay pretty quickly. Remember that the stuff for model railroaders is meant to be fixed and looked at and not touched and handled, let alone have troops dropped on them, be bowled over by agitated hand movements, have munchies snowed on them, or as supports for ponderous rule manuals.
Now you may be tempted to run out into the yard and gather up a lot of old dead twigs from the trees and use them, but you will be making a big mistake. Though they look really realistic (they ought to) they are not very functional. Dead wood in small thicknesses tends to be very brittle, and it gets more brittle the "deader" it gets. Using this stuff as trunks of trees will mean you will be breaking a lot of them shortly after you've built them, and the only way to get them thick enough to stand up to wear and tear is to make them so massive they no longer look in scale. Most of the materials you need however can easily be purchased or scrounged.
Branches for conifers can be made in the same way, only this time you MUST use braided wire of about the same thickness. Now fold or wrap a piece of the galvanized wire around a short section of the braided or solid copper wire and crimp with needle nose pliers. Here is the first problem... copper is a very soft metal and if you are too rough you will force the galvanized steel so hard it will cut the copper wires and it will fall apart! That is why to begin you should try it with the solid first... it's a lot more forgiving.
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