"10 - 12mm Pine Forest Bases " Topic

As part of my large ongoing projects being 10mm Ancients, 12mm Medieval, 10mm Renaissance, 10mm Marlburian and 12mm ACW, I decided to make some Pine forests to add to my ever growing collection of scenery. To This end I bought 300 small scale pine trees of different colours & sizes to add variety to each individual base of trees, of which there would be 100 bases in total. I had already made the larger forest bases as I have 100 bases of deciduous trees which I currently use, but I wanted Pine trees to add to this as I hadn't any at all. 

To make the individual tree bases I simply cut 40mm circles out of Marley tile and then cut 35mm circles from 3mm thick high density foam which I got for free from supermarket pizza base bottoms. The foam was then chamfered to make a seemless rise in the base and glued on to the Marley tile with carpet tackifier which is a latex rubber glue. Once dry I pricked three holes in around the base for the trees to fit into and then took the smaller trees and glued them in place with the tackifier and left them to dry. The process was followed until I had 3 trees on each base and they were all left overnight to thoroughly dry. I must point out that it is best to do this in batches of around 25 to thirty as some of the cutting processes can be quite tedious.

​With the trees dry I decided to  glue down some rocks  with tackifier  and left them to dry out so that I could paint the whole of the bases including the rocks with dark brown paint. The rocks were then painted grey and drybrushed with a pale linen colour and various bushes added for effect. Finally the base was again painted brown which was used as the glue to attach the scatter material and that was it.

​Here are some pics to show how they look and some figures to give a sense of scale. More pics on my blog: link

Very nice!

What is Marley Tile?

Marley Tile is a brand of vinyl floor tile sold here in the UK mostly to building contractors to cover over untreated concrete floors in house building projects. It's about 2mm thick and cuts very easily and unlike other vinyl tiles it has no adhesive backing and is very hard wearing. I use them for most of my basing because I bought 100's of them as a job lot years ago.

Looks great.

They look great!

I'm a big convert to vinyl for basing. Works well, and is in my opinion far superior to fender washers for basing.

With the latter, you have the issue of filling the hole(s), and I could rarely if ever get the glue to stick well to it, though in fairness, I was using low-temp hot glue, and other stuff back then. Perhaps high-temp works better.

Now, I just use high-temp hot glue, after drilling a small hole for the wire to be inserted into. Apply the hot glue in the hole, and insert the trees. Seems to hold very well, and is far less expensive than using metal washers.

Much faster to make bases for them as well, since I don't have to worry about filling empty washer holes with cardboard, styrene, or other materials.

I've based some trees individually, and some in groups of 2 – 4 trees, as shown above.