"Hand painted Toyvian trees" Topic

I finished my last 2 Toyvian trees… so now the set of 3 small, 2 medium and 1 large tree are done. These are great trees if you want to move away from traditionally flocked model train trees. They work well beside Dwarven Forge and GW Citadel Trees as I show on my blog post…

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And this older blog post talks about how I take them from factory fresh to battlefield ready with weighting the bases, heating and shaping the limbs, and then painting them.

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I like your trees, but they would not be practical for me. I need loads of trees for a 5-foot by 9-foot table. I went the route of buying $70 USD worth of plastic trees from a cake supplier. Their minimum order was around $60 USD, so I bought a horde of tree products, sharing them with my gaming friends, to defray the cost, and split them up so I wasn't drowning in them! This was around 18 years ago.

All I had to do with mine, was to base them. That was plenty of work, due to the fact that I had around 200 trees. I even applied The Dip Technique to a number of them, to improve their look. The real improvements, however, came from texturing the bases with blotches of colored sands. I am set for life, now, for trees. Cheers!

Since I'm painting the GW Citadel woods, I went looking on your blog to see how you did that--useful hints, ideas, insights. I couldn't find anything on the woods (though I did have fun looking at several other things). It got me to thinking about the aesthetics of the GW Citadel trees and how they would fit with my model railroad trees. 8^(

I'm interested in seeing how your world building turns out.

Grelber

I have all 3 sizes of those trees and the ones I have the paint is flat and there is no plastic shine. The leaves and bark are multicolored and very realistic. The small trees leaves lay flat, some branches can be twisted and stay there but most return to flat. Mixed with the Medium and Large sizes is OK for me if the foliage is facing out because my table is against a wall so I game from one side only. I paid like $2 USD for Small, $4 USD for Medium and $9 USD for Large. I got lucky in that the usual China Post delivery time of 10 days to 2 weeks didn't happen. This was during Trump's Trade War with China but whatever the cause the trees didn't come. I contacted the Sellers and they immediately shipped replacements. No trees came. I contacted them again and again they sent more. One day all of the orders came so I ended up with a forest. My table is 30" by 72" and covered in forest right now. My original wargaming plan was more or less in desert with scrub but these trees are so nice I have to do a major rethink. I bought steel washers thru Amazon to base them. A few trees came out of the mold all twisted up but I salvages them by cutting off some trunks and branches. The plastic must have a "memory" because reshaping them just doesn't work. The Large size (9" High) are perfect as is. Check out the pics of these trees on E-Bay to see just what great models they are.

Grelber, perhaps this blog entry might help? I talk a little bit how I added a few details to the GW forest that my wife painted. Things like a mushroom, greenstuff leaves on the ground, etc. The only tip my wife had to share was she preferred painting the branches/leaves before assembling the trees.

Oh, and she added some spare bits from a set of the newer trees GW came out with that we won in a bits box auction on eBay.

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Hockermp5, it is interesting that yours came painted because mine did not. They were made of brown plastic for the trunk/limbs and green plastic for the branches/leaves.

To reshape the limbs Inheated them 10 seconds in very hot (almost boiling) water, bent to desired shape and held in that position while placing under a cold running tap. The sudden cold helps change the memory of the plastic. However this only worked well for the trunk/limbs. The green plastic branches/leaves were more resistant to even this technique.

Rick….Mine were assembled and painted in totally flat colors. The leaves looked to have had some highlighting and a dark wash to bring out detail. The trunks were a light brown with the creases in the bark a darker color. Very realistic bark effect. Very like Red Cedars. It was the Small size trees where the leaves were flat, the Medium had few like that and the Large none. I thought if I used the boiling water technique I would mess up the paint job so I just worked at twisting them with mixed results.

If you can buy these trees painted do so.All they need is heavy bases as Small and Medium tip over easy. Large stay upright pretty well but a steel washer base is good for stability.

Fascinating! I did not realize there were painted options. I understand your concern about heating them given that they were painted.

I believe I got 5 of the small trees in an Adventure Force Jumbo Bucket of Dinosaurs.
At least they look like the ones you have.