Following on from my previous post, here is some more detail on how I what I do with trees.
I make two sorts, one with pins and one with bases.
Some more pinned examples:
Some on bases, this time multiple ones:
The ones with pins go in holes in the terrain boards. I drill through the MDF and insert a length of tube into which the tree pin can be inserted.
This board has a hole next to the road at the bottom:
The holes are obvious enough to be found if I'm looking for one but discrete enough not to be noticeable otherwise. I place them anywhere that seems appropriate (near buildings, roads etc). As they are individual trees they don't interfere with movement of units. In fact they are not supposed to play any role in a game.
The trees with bases are destined to fill up areas of woodland or forest. Here is a board that has a small copse next to a ploughed field.
The copse is delimited by the reddish brown ground cover which is supposed to represent fallen leaves and which also covers the tree bases. Here is the board with trees in place:
The advantage here is that the tree bases can be moved around within the copse area to allow units or vehicles to pass.
Some of my trees are bought from model railway suppliers, others I make myself, especially the larger ones. The framework is provided by Mother Nature herself in the form of twigs from the garden. It takes quite a lot of searching to find bits of the right size and shape. Here is a particularly good one:
I leave these to dry if necessary and then varnish, though I'm not sure if that makes any difference. If necessary I add extra "branches" made of plastic rod and then put on the foliage. For this I used to use Foliage Clusters (or Clump Foliage, I can never remember which is which) from Woodland Scenics but recently I started making them from rubberized horsehair covered in scatter material.
This one has the horsehair in place but not the scatter:
The first photo of this post shows two examples of the finished article.
Cordialement,
Le Colonel
