Making Trees (a.k.a. don't throw anything away)

Good morning gamers,

As the TMAT GT 2019 approaches, I'm making terrain! I've always believed that the best way to get a terrain project done is to give yourself a deadline and I've been working on forests for quite a while (read, since I got started almost nine years ago). Today's post is informed by YouTube videos from The Terrain Tutor, though there are other channels on YouTube who will show you how to do this too (I'm subscribe to Lukes Aps as well).



1) Terrain - Wire Armature Trees

There are lots of videos on wire armature trees (I like this one from Mel the Terrain Tutor or this one from Lukes Aps) - and so far as I can tell, I'm the only person who uses twist-ties. You know the feeling: you've gone through so many loaves of bread or gotten fresh produce from the grocery store that now you've got a drawer full of twist-ties that "I'll use when we need a twist tie" - like when you open a new bag of chips or perhaps for cereal bags if you don't move cereal to a container. I ended up with tons of these things so a while back (basically when I started in the hobby), I heard that you could use wire to make your own trees. And I began saving twist-ties. Since I'm taking a Lothlorien army to the tournament, I'm bringing a woodland board - and finally getting all those twist-ties out of the hobby boxes and getting them painted up.

2) Terrain Bases - Unwanted CDs

Mel the Terrain Tutor showed this one to me: use unwanted CDs to make bases for your terrain. Unlike cardboard, they won't warp over time and they're strong enough to handle strong material. I, being a pack-rat/hoarder, don't believe in giving up perfectly good CDs for the sake of hobbying, so instead, I use the blank plastic CD that comes at the bottom of a blank CD rack instead - it's just going to be thrown away anyway, so why not save it and use it for terrain. :) As Mel shows, you then use spackle putty (or "filler" as they say on the other side of the pond) to make a smooth grade on it and make the terrain you put on it stable and blended into the ground. With a little bit of tape over the hole, you can have a clean spackle surface, though I've put large rocks on mine so these bases aren't "just trees." For that kind of base, I turn to...

3) Terrain Bases - Light Switch Plates

So the other day I was changing the light switch plates (and power outlet plates) in my house (we were repainting some rooms and the old plates were painted over by the previous owners) and I ended up with a handful of light switch plates. I looked at it and said, "Those two screw holes could probably hold two wire trees..." So I grabbed four of them and, taking a note from the CD base presented above, fit some trees into them:

"Hey Love, I'm going to replace all the light switch plates with a color that you like, okay?"

These will be mounted on cardboard for me (you could use MDF - though it'll be heavy), but that hole in the middle will require some work. Thankfully, that's easy - you can use spackle/filler, clump foliage, or...

4) Terrain Basing - Expanding Foam Bits

I've been playing around with expanding foam for my hills (need to get more - old can clogged up), but when you shave the expanding foam the way you want it, you end up with lots of little, shallow bits. These look like rocks hidden in the earth and happened to be (from my last experiment) the perfect size to cover that little slit:

"Rocks by two trees...how natural..."

To blend these together, they'll all need to be painted (probably with some flocking afterwards), but what they REALLY need is some leaves and bushes. For that we turn to an alternative to clump foliage...

5) Creating Clump Foliage - Cotton Stuffing

So my kids love to wear things out - and one of the more recent things they wore out were the chair cushions we had in our dining room. With all six of them (only three kids, but six worn out cusions...what's up with that?) in terrible shape, my wife turned to me and said, "These need to go." One of them had a rip in the seam and the cotton stuffing was falling out so I said, "Sure, just one second." And off I ran to grab a gallon-size storage bag and I stuffed it as full as I could with stuffing. Then I threw out the rest (amateur, I know). I finally got around to dying them (immersion in a mixture of acrylic paint/water) and here's what I got:

I had some light green/yellow and some dark green (done in two batches). I will warn you that I had acrylic paint stains on my hands for two days no matter how much washing I did...

You'll see all kinds of foliage videos from the Terrain Tutor - this one is akin to the Lichen video he posted. While I've toyed around with other ones he recommends (sponges and coconut fiber specifically), I liked that this technique glues down a clump of something, giving it some rigidity if it bumps into something else (storing trees that don't bump into things is a MASSIVE waste of space). Instead of using lichen (which was formerly alive), I've used cotton - you'll see some white, but it's predominantly green (and I plan to touch-up paint some gold/yellow on there before the tournament anyway since that's how Lothlorien is described).

6) Putting It All Together

So you've got your bases (a mixture of circular and rectangular), you've got your trees and rocks/pseudo-rocks, and you've got your clump foliage. With a lot of good painting (probably could have/should have done some immersion dunking, but oh well), you can get the bases prepped, the trees readied (go thick on that paint if you don't wrap it in putty - it's multi-colored you know), and the foliage glued on with good ole PVA:

The light plate trees - some extra foliage was placed on the ground for bushes...

So that's it - nothing fancy, nothing ground-shattering, not even the best job. But it suffices and it was fun and it turn junk into useful terrain (and saved me lots of money buying pre-made trees/bases). That's about a close to alchemy as we get these days. Next time, we begin a series on bad guy heroes because as fun as running Lothlorien will be in the tournament, I've got bad-guys on the brain, so stay tuned for discussions on Ringwraiths (who we omitted in our discussion of magic casters), Trolls (three in particular), and whether Dunlendings have any kind of value at all. See you then - happy hobbying!