Due to a sudden downturn in available gaming time of my usual opponents, I recently sat down to see what kind of set-up for a small solo game I could put together at home. (My opponent has all of the necessary terrain stored at his house, so I usual concentrate on painting troops.) Like many others, I occasionally buy interesting looking items at the hobby shop without knowing exactly what I'm going to do with it. A case in point is the bag of Woodland Scenics 'foliage clusters' which I found hidden under other boxes near my work table. I was thinking more in terms of experimenting with hedges when I bought them, but since I now needed trees...
My Mk I tree (small 25mm) were a dark brown stained piece of dowel rod with a couple of lumps of foliage cluster glued to the end. Serviceable, but not especially pretty. One of my friends saw them and laboriously built a couple of very nice tree armatures from dowel rods and toothpicks to use with the clusters. I looked at those, and thought "There must be an easier way..."
Well, there is. A little scrounging around after a storm produced a number of twigs from common local trees with sufficient complexity (three or four little branches in a small area) to be a reasonable tree armature. I cut off the 'bottom' ends flat, glued them to large fender washers (using a gap filling superglue), then dribbled white glue liberally on the upper ends and jammed the foliage clusters on. This is about as fast a method as I can think of for tree manufacture.
The resulting trees already have a decent trunk color, and therefore don't reguire painting or staining. Odd dribbles of the white glue dry transparent. If the trees don't look bulky enough, extra foliage cluster lumps can be attached with piece. of toothpick (painted dark brown for reduced visibility) dipped in white glue as pins. Clusters which are too square as a result of the cutting process can have pieces torn off, and these bits can be saved for some very coarse ground cover on large figure bases.
A bag of foliage clusters produces four or five trees without stretching too far, and it doesn't take very long to do. I haven't abused them enough yet to know how long the clusters pinned with toothpicks will hold, but it looks like repairs ought to be pretty simple. The only major problem I have experienced so far in that the larger trees are a bit too top-heavy for the 1 1/2" fender washers I used for bases.
When I had finished a few of the Mk II trees and set them up on my billiard-table green felt ground cloth, I was inspired to go back to the hobby shop to pick up some more "Woodland Scenic" stuff. They sell a special white glue which they claim remains flexible (this may be available under another name in some other hobby, but it wasn't too expensive and I'm too lazy to do much experimentation) which sounded like it ought to be good on felt, along with the spray bottle(s) needed to attach a mixture of their ground foam to the felt.
I used mixed green as a base, and threw handfuls of light green, dark green, and two shades of earth, in fine, coarse, and very coarse textures onto the cloth, periodically wetting it with the glue sprayer. (Put down newspaper before trying this!) The felt was fairly well soaked through by the time I was down, and took about twenty-four hours to dry. The results were impressive.
This technique was described, by the way, in MWAN #33. I used the same technique, just using the two shades of brown, on the brown felt strips I was using for roads and paths. I also tried the same thing on brown felt before cutting it into the road shapes to see if it was easier, or wasted less of the material (You lose some around the edges which gets stuck to the newspaper. You can recover a lot of the unstuck material, but not all.) Both methods worked, and it seems to be a tossup as to which would be preferred.
The folks from Geohex will sell you the same thing, a ground foam covered felt groundcloth, in one shade of mixed medium green, which could be enhanced with these methods. My groundcloth was easy enough to do because it's only about 15" by 30" (to fit the only clear surface space in the house that can be left set up out of reach of the baby and the cats), but a larger effort might benefit from the commercial starting place.
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© Copyright 1991 Hal Thinglum
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