Tutorial: Trees!

Look, I made some trees!

Sorry for the bad pictures. It's not really worth taking more impressive pictures of single trees unless they're standing on a nice gaming table I think.

I got the idea from my gaming buddy who made some exquisite trees for a big American Civil War game we put up for Austrian Salute 2016.

Here are a few of his trees on a gaming table we played Advanced Song of Blades and Heroes (excellent Fantasy skirmish game, you can find my review here.) on in late 2016:

It was a very fun game too. If you're interested you can find my battle report here.

Of course I had to have such trees as well, if only to add to my friend's collection, because you always need many pretty trees.

So I bought a bunch of wire armatures from Austromodell as well as a box of NOCH Naturbäume:

I decided to start with eight large trees. At the beginning I glued them to bases (large washers and milliput). I bent the armatures to look right, then gave them some tree bark texture. Then the long, arduous job of gluing tiny little branches to the trees...

Once that was done I applied PVA to the brances and used a hefty amount of freeze-dried Parsley I got from Lidl for foliage.

Any brand will work.

For different kinds of foliage or representing different seasons I suggest experimenting with different kinds of dried spices. For autumn leafs you can of course just grab a few handfulls of fallen leafs, dry and crush them.

...and that's it! They aren't super-pretty, but once they're on a table they'll look just fine. I still got quite a lot of armatures of various sizes lying around, so in the end I'll have a nice collection of trees. 

Because it's not really great having nicely painted miniatures on a table that just doesn't look the part.

I hope that you liked this little tutorial!