In part III of the series, I am showing off a few hand made trees that I got from a buddy of mine that lives in St. Louis. He has been experimenting with different techniques for making his own trees out of wire and latex. The trees are part of his spruce style and give a nice effect when mixed with other trees on the gaming table. He makes them large, so they work great for 28mm skirmish gaming (can’t wait to use them in my next Muskets and Tomahawks game!).
He put together a batch and gave me a handful to add to my collection. Since he uses a different basing technique than I do, he left the bases open, so I could do my own thing. I glued on some ballast to each base using white glue. Let that dry and painted over the base with dark brown. I then drybrushed them up using earth and then light tan. I finished up the bases with some scenic flock (flock and static grass mix. I then hit the model with some dull coat to better seal with flock. With that the trees are all ready to go!
My buddy puts these threes together out of inexpensive commercial products which makes the cost extremely low (he can probably do 50 trees for about twenty bucks in products). It does take a little bit of time, but shows that you do not have to spend very much to have nice terrain on your table, if you are willing to commit a little time. I’ll post the full assembly instructions in a later post (once he gives me each step!). Unit then, hopefully, these will encourage you to try your own tree building experiments!
- Manteuffel