Hi all,
As promised, here's a tutorial on a new idea I had for micro scale forests. This is why I asked about methods for chopping the stuff up. In this instance I used the old stuff I had broken up by hand along with some net-based canopy foliage from a company called Wee Scapes. If you're on the West Coast you may have seen this- I've never seen it outside of LA, but the company makes a few good products at an extremely low price point.
This technique is super fast, super cheap and easy enough for a child to do and it delivers consistent, quality results. It is a "scale step down" terrain for 3mm and 6mm, so its not at 1:1 scale to the figures but to the ground scale of the units.
The end result of this style of forest is this:
Sorry I don't have any better pics at the moment. I really need to do up a terrain mat here to show how they'd look in situ. Here's all the equipment you'll need:
…Plus whatever broken up clump foliage you may have laying around. The glue is probably known to everyone in the US because its sold at Walmart and most hobby stories. It is extremely thick and tacky and dries very tough and clear, especially when applied thickly. That's how you're going to apply it to the top of your NON-POROUS surface… in this case an upside down pie pan.
First step is to put the glue on pretty thick DIRECTLY onto the non-porous surface. It doesn't have to be super thick, say as thick as a thin Litko base. You can go ahead and experiment with this, but you want to err on the side of thickness. As you can see, I've added some of the dark canopy foliage into the middle. The glue is so tacky that it holds it right in place.
I add some more…
Next, I add some small foliage clumps in different colors to the periphery:
Finally, I put some dabs of the glue on top along with some ribbons, and break up the dark middle section, while leaving some portions of it in place:
Now the next step is to heat your oven to about 180-210 degrees- (I wouldn't take it over boiling point if I were you). You're going to stick the pie-plate (or whatever) into the oven and leave it there, checking every five minutes or so. This is the only way to make the glue on the bottom of the pan dry- if you don't put it in the oven you can wait several days and it will still be totally wet in the middle. If you pop it into the oven it'll take fifteen minutes or so. But watch it- you don't want to find out what happens if it gets too hot… and I honestly can't tell you. But if you keep the oven warm and not hot, and check repeatedly, you'll be ok. It will only take a few minutes.
Now, I haven't dried the glue out all the way yet. What I've done is this: after about 15 minutes or so when its about 75% of the way dry I take a spatula and gently pry the woods from the plate. It'll be pretty tough already but be careful not to split it up. Once you get it up from the non-porous surface you place it back down onto the same surface, gently, without pushing it down hard, and pull it back into the proper dimensions. Put it back into the oven for about five minutes and then remove. The space you created when you gently placed it back on the surface will have allowed it to dry all the way through.
The end result is something like this:
Which is tough and won't have pieces falling off of it but which is flexible like this:
The biggest advantage of this over other methods of making forest bases is that you don't have to contend with any warping, for the simple reason that there is nothing involved that can warp- the glue dries perfectly flat on itself! The other advantage is that its flexible enough to place on a rolling terrain mat so that it'll hug hills and contours. You can cut it with scissors, or use a razor to cut out clearings and the like from the middle of it. If you chop/pull/cut/food-process the foliage clusters correctly it'll be flat enough to place units on top of it. The canopy foliage has those plastic fibers in it and when the glue dries inside of those it becomes almost indestructible to normal use. It's a lot easier to make that the foam core and nail type-forests, not only because you can skip the nail-trunks, but also because you don't have to use a hot glue gun (if you've ever tried to make this sort of forest, you know how dangerous/difficult it can be!). Plus, you probably have the materials needed to try this method out in your hobby room right now. I highly recommend trying this out if you are using the smaller scales.
(UPDATE): I just took some more pics including the piece I show in the step-by-step above:
Here's the back of the forest I showed above after baking:
Here's all three of the sections I've done so far:
The two on the left are the more recent ones and the small section on the right is the first, experimental one I did. I didn't use the canopy foliage on that one and used some watered-down glue to seal the foliage from the top. This actually makes it stiffer and less flexible- if you have the right kind of glue you won't need to do this, and on the two sections on the left I didn't and they turned out better (still dot the canopy section with glue to break it up, just don't soak it in order to toughen it up).
Here's a better close up with some minis:
I'm going to try (fingers crossed) to get a terrain mat done this weekend and if I do I'll take some better pics of my 3mm figs along with the forest bases. I think that they'll look a lot better on top of a mat.
Also, if you wanted you could also mound up the foliage to create wooded hills, or place sculpy mounds inside the glue to create the same. I'll be messing around with this idea as well this coming weekend….
