"Adding crawling leaves/vines to exterior stone walls" Topic

Hello all.

In the process of adding finishing details to two terrain pieces, both happen to be GW kits that I posted previously when I was showing progress on when painting them.

For the longest time I always wanted to try to attempt doing crawling vines or wild leaves growing on the outside of a ruin or castle. My first attempt at it turned out pretty well. I used a fantastic product from a website called antenocitisworkshop. They sell an excellent range of scratchbuilding and basing materials, as well as their own line of leaf effect materials. One small tub of the stuff is about $8.00 USD but it goes a long, long way. I suppose you could also achieve this effect with certain kitchen herbs, but this product is amazing because each individual piece of flock looks like a real miniature leaf.

Here's the product;
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I used Super Tacky white craft glue to apply the leaves to the vertical surfaces of the models. The two kits shown here are GW's both now out of production Skullvane Manse and Dreadstone Blight. You will also see how I dealt with the dreaded skull issue that plagues so many GW kits. I treated the overkill skulls on Dreadstone Blight as if they were just part of the carved stone of the walls. The model the way I painted has I think the look of being a real abandoned ruin, as opposed to how it looks on the box cover. The model, if painted the usual way is just WAAAAAY too busy to be an effective ruin. GW seems to just try to cram too many themes and do too much with their building kits and it ends up being overkill. You have to simply ignore a lot of the GW themes and just paint it as an old ruin, which really toned down the model and made it feel much more real and much less "Games Workshopish".

Hope you like the results!

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Tim,

You are most welcome…!

I also wanted to add that as far as the application of the leaves, I really didn't do anything fancy when actually applying them. It was just dabbing the glue up the piece in the shape of a vine and then I had to dump a small quantity of leaves over it and then press them in until enough stuck to the glue.

I couldn't figure out any other way to do it, and I suppose the "leaves" themselves can really face in any direction, since real vines' leaves do that.

If you look at the website link, they show a couple examples of their product being used on models. There is a small tower ruin and, whoever did it, it looks they must have taken tweezers or some other fine instrument and actually layered the leaves a few at a time so that they were all facing the same way and looked like they were coming off the same stem! Not sure what kind of glue they would have used to achieve that, maybe just ordinary white glue, but in any case it's AMAZING work! But I just wouldn't have the patience to lay them that carefully. Luckily, they look just as real if you just press them on.

This is the one I'm talking about!

The real key to these is using a very stiff glue. You COULD get away with regular Elmer's white glue or other PVA glue. However, you would have to put on a very, very thin layer of glue so that it didn't run down the piece as it was drying. With the Super Tacky brand, it starts out so thick and stiff that you can put it on a vertical surface and it just doesn't move. You can also put it on a bit thicker because of that, which allows more opportunity for the leaves to stick in and catch enough of the glue to hold on.

Nice work Baranovich: I've used Antenoctis vines and leaves as well and they do provide an effective result.

John T