"Alien plants?" Topic

Aquarium plants are a neat idea, but they can be expensive. Any other ideas for interesting (and not bankrupting) alien fauna?

What about real plants? Seriously you can get tons of small real plants that look amazingly alien for next to nothing. Then you can take cuttings of those and get even more for free. Just make a small depression in a styrene mound and pop a drain hole in the bottom. Fill with either a hydro medium or potting mix and plant/transplant the plants into that.

One thing Ive seen is those little styrofoam balls with toothpicks in it it like a big round cactus. Painted, for instance, green with giant red spines.

btw: fauna is animals, flora is plant life.

Look at plastic and silk plants everywhere. Dollar stores have them, and most major craft stores. They often go on sale as the seasons change. You'd be surprised how many strange looking decorative plants there are in real life that are reproduced for the artifical greenery market.

Regiment Gamer "btw: fauna is animals, flora is plant life."

Right you are. 30 whacks on me with Merriam Websters. Sorry, been a long day.

the other face of the clock – aquarium stuff is very cheap – or can be. Take a look at the ones I got from my local aquatic store in Watford (guess this only helps if you are in the Uk) aliensurfer.co.uk – in the scenery galleries. The bits I got were £1.79 GBP and £2.89. They had some other really cool pieces going up to around £15.00 GBP a pop – but these were big pieces and very nice.

For the record – the strips of plastic plants and the like were up to around £5.00 GBP a pack. Just these rocks and trees with the plants on suited a jungle environment enough for me anyway.

I made some very "alien" plants using some big acorn caps, thorns and some wire.
I turned the acron caps upside down and hot-glued in some big thorns and some wire "tentacles" (madefrom a piece of 16guage wire twisted together). Then, I used hot glue to cover the wire, making it look like a tentacle.
Black undercoat, greens/yellows and red/purple drybrush.
I made just a few. The guys all wanted to buy them from me. They got to be s bad about it, I finally gave them to the game store. He had to keep them under the counter.

Ive seen some very nice alien 'trees' made from styrene packing peices – the ones like a hollow hemisphere – glued into columns as trunks. Also some nice 'bushes' make from a common (in Australia) seed pod with a small branchlet of plastic aquarium plant stuck in the top.

Keep a look out in the bargain bin for odd coloured plastic plants such as red, blue or white aquarium plants – very often substantially marked down as they look too odd to sell.

Around Xmas time lots of stores get various balls & wreaths of plastic foliage clumps stuck into foam balls. After a while some of these get damaged from kids pulling them apart or using them as footballs – again substantially discounted & you just pull off the remaining clumps & ude them as 'trees' or 'large bushes.

Check craft stores for potpourri (sp?) and other dried plants/fruits/whatever.

Aquarium plants aren't so expensive, some can be cut apart to make dozens of smaller plants.

And otherwise (or in combination with the above), just go crazy with some wire, masking tape and modelling putty. Some nice fleshy, tentacled flora can be made that way.

Coral from aquarium stores also makes nifty plants, especially if painted nicely. I've got a chunk of coral glued to an old AOL CD, painted bright blue with softer blue stripes. Cyaphill, anyone?

One fun one is small lead fishing weights, the 'split shot' kind. Open them up a little, and glue in clumps for little clusters of insect-eating plants.

If you're feeling silly, go for the Dr Seuss look, with clumps of bright pink fake fur on the ends of twisty trunks.

Our group makes good use of what we've referred to as 'Punji Weed', namely a bunch of round toothpicks sticking up from the ground like bamboo. Cheap and easy, as well as providing terrain that no army in their right mind will enjoy walking through. Use spraypaints to save yourself a migraine, though.

Half-pingpong balls make for interesting 'fungal nodules'. Want some real fun, put them on bits of wire and green stuff as tethered 'gasbag' plants..

And finally, for the ultimate in cheap SF terrain: plastic sushi grass.

Have you tried dried plants from 'Giant Land' (the real world, painted and sealed? Some of the weeds (excuse me 'wildflowers')I've been cutting down lately would make some seriously wierd vegitation if 'magnified' to miniature scale.

Graycat

Made a trip to Michaels, and got some weird plastic plants that I will break up and mount. Let you guys know how this one works out.

Hope this provides some inspiration:

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CC

Way to necro, CC.

For some further inspiration, here's an article from April's Scientific American on exactly this topic.

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I've used lychees as Martian flora and button mushrooms as giant mushrooms. I eat them after and buy a fresh batch as required. Saves on storage too!

How's this?

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CC

I did some web scanning for the various nasty plantlife models out there a little while ago:
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Very nice. I have got to get me a few of those!

Some are very close to the real thing:

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CC

I bought several bags of interesting stuff in an Indian food store recently. They were various spices (I think!)- they'd need bashing up with a fairly substantial hammer if you were going to cook with them!

I was walking along beneath an oak tree today, and noticed a large number of acorns. What if these were mounted to scenery, and painted? Funky little pod-things, and completely free..

I have been using some interesting bits of plants and dried/artificial flwoers from craft stores to make mine as well. There are some photos of the flora on my blog: vbir.blogspot.com

I also started casting some small resin stumps with roots whenever I have leftover resin (which is everytime I try to cast), so I have quite a few little stumps to glue bits of foliage to. That's essentially how I did the Volcano Pepper plants that the farmers grow on Mars. Plus, the little stumps are terrain in and of themselves…

Let's try that again:

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CC

I'm getting tired of this censor crap.

Here it goes again. I think that the bleeped part is the / plus the letters ftw spelled backwards:

community.livejournal.com_nature/278567.html"link

CC

This is too cool:

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CC

This is awesome artwork:

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CC

To add to the alien plant building materials -- the grocery store.

beans, dried peas, pasta, other dried vegetables…

More ideas here:

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CC

Check craft and floral stores for artificial house plants. They tend to be a bit cheaper than the ones for fish tanks.

It wouldn't be cheap, but I have seen some very brightly colored, alien looking plants/flowers in the garden deparment occasionally.

Not sure what they are called, but they are brilliantly colored red, orange, and yellow flame-like plants, shaped rather like the pointed oval head of a spear tip.

Simply beautiful, and alien looking, with a lot of small, thin leaves, like an evergreen.

If they could be attached to a wire support to keep them upright, and then treated with glycerine, or sealed with a clear coating, they would make excellent alien trees. No need to paint them, since they already look very alien-esque.

Has anyone tried treating live plants, and using them on the tabletop?

I know lychens are used by model railroaders, and wargamers, in may cases – these are treated with glycerine, to keep them moist, and spongy, so they don't crumble to dust when touched.

"lychens . . . treated with glycerine, to keep them moist, and spongy, so they don't crumble to dust when touched."

Hmm. Wouldn't that leave some sort of grease mark on the surface of the table?

CC

With all the talk about using plastic and other plants, I went ahead and sculpted an alien tree trunk, with a small indentation on top, for inserting foliage.

Hope to have photos posted this weekend.

CC

Check out our friends at terra genesis…they have it going on, all the time. :)

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and not terraG but cool none the less

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Ikea has giant seed pods…. giant seed pods glued down to a flocked base in small groups makes for some impressive alien "trees"…

Leland R. Erickson
Metal Express
metal-express.net

I've had good luck with using Potpourri for alien plants.