Making Trees that I can live with

Experimenting with foliage design I have come up with three approaches to cover either broad areas of forest or small crops of trees that would likely be found beside roads and around towns.

Forests

Using Upholstery Foam or Polyurethane Cushioning Foam cut the shape of the area you wish to cover.  Now cut to a height of about 10mm to 15mm (for 6mm scale) don't worry about keeping it neat in fact the rougher the better.  Once this is done using tweezers "pluck" pieces of the foam to remove any straight edges and give some shape to the forest.

Now you have the foam formed its time to colour it so that it no longer looks bright yellow/white.  I use craft paint in water, 1 part paint to 4 parts water(roughly).  I used brown as I was going for a forest edge look, but I am not sure if it works well, comments I have had say it looks better than total green.


Pour the mixed paint into a jar and stuff the foam in, close the lid and shake.  Ring out the foam into the jar and repeat for your other forests or put a lid on to use it again later, layout your now coloured foam on a flat surface to dry.

Once its dry grab some contact adhesive spray, keeping the foam forest side up on newspaper spray the entire surface with glue.  Place the now glued forest foam on a clean sheet of paper and shake flock over the forest canopy and let dry (15-20mins to be sure).  Once it dry, shake off the excess flock and place it back on your spray paper, respray to seal the flock on the forest and let dry again.  Dry brush with yellow or light green will bring out the highlights, I have not in my examples but plan to.

Now your forest is ready to mount on the board.  Using pins which you have used the same craft paint as you used to colour the foam, pin the forest in place, careful not to push the pin in too deep to misshape the foam.

For larger scales or a stand alone forest layout Architects of War have a great guide;
http://architectsofwar.com/Howto/forests.pdf




Trees

Option A:
This process is quick and easy but will take ages to make a forest worth of trees and even longer to mount them on your board.  These trees are not really designed to be permanent and are placed on the board when your ready to play.

Using some of Woodland Scenics Clumped Foliage and some normal dress pins, make sure you get the ones with normal metal pin heads not the plastic bulb ones.

Grab yourself some green craft paint that is similar in colour as the clump foliage you have.  Paint the pin heads and let dry.

Open your clump foliage and find some firm pieces, some will be firm to hard where the rubber has bonded more than others, these pieces make perfect trees.

Pierce the foliage with one of your painted pins in manor that you feel look tree like.  Make sure the pin head is as covered as possible.


Now grab some 50/50 PVA wood glue/water mix and pour some into a small container.  Dip the foliage pin into the glue insuring the glue covers all of the foliage then let the excess drain off.  Stand the pin in a piece of foam to dry.

The foliage is rubber so if your glue is not sticking then you have to much water in your mix.
 

Finish touches would have a bit of dry brush highlights of yellow or lighter green to round off the look.

Option B:
Using Upholstery Foam that has been coloured as above, cut a rough tree shape out.  Cut a slit into the foam approx half way up the tree shape (as if you were chopping the top of the tree off), stick a pin down through the centre of the tree out of the base of the foam (keep it straight as you can as it will make using it easier).

Using PVA glue cover the pin and let the top of half of the foam flip back using the glue to seal it up again.  This will also act as a hard surface to push the pin into your board with.

Let this glue dry, pluck the tress shape gently with tweezers and glue and flock.  Spray with glue again and your down.

Foam Tree

I find this method a long winded way to make trees and the foam never seems to look as real as I can get the Clump Foliage to look, Clump also dries harder and is much less likely to wear out.

Option C:
Pine Trees are easy to make with pipe cleaners, get ones with a decent amount of material on the wire, dont get it too short else you will lose your ability to sculpt it.

Austrian Command Stand with Pine Tree

Cut the cleaner into lengths of about 1 inch.  Now using a lighter or candle, melt back the material on one end, this will form the pin to stick in your board.  Melt it back so that about 1/2 to 2/3 of the material is removed.  Now carefully tapper in the top so to seal in the other end and stop you losing the material over time.

Sample Trees

Using a hair spray or spray glue, coat the material that remains, then dip the tree in flock.  Allow to dry then using metal snips, tapper off the bottom so that its pointed to be able to stick in a base or board.  Due to the broadness that the twisted wire will have I would not used this to stick in a cloth covered board as it will permanently damage the foam.  What I have used this for is character bases for command and other stands.

I prefer this look for miniature stands as the wire pipe cleaner gives it a bit more strength and can take a bit of a knock.


Addition
I have just finished experimenting with wire trees and have come back with mixed results.  I feel the trees are too delicate to be mobile enough for gaming, but they do look as close as you can get to real trees.

Photo below shows on the left, the wire frame of the tree wrapped about a pin to make sticking in foam easier.  This is then shaped to look like a tree, painted with PVA.  Once dry you would paint it tree coloured and then glue on the clump foliage at the end of the branches.  Cover the foliage in PVA and sprinkle flock on.

The third tree was an attempt to use fibrous material purchased at spotlight that I had planned for smoke from gun fire markers.  Hairspray to catch the flock and to hold it.  By and large a massive fail....

Conclusion

I have decided that I will be settling on the following for trees.

These are 3/4" to 2" Armatures (Deciduous), which you can purchase from most model train stores.  I would strongly advise using the woodland scenic Hob-e-tac adhesive as it does the job perfectly.

To add to a little something to them I purchased some rare earth magnets 2.5mm by 2mm and drilled open the base stand with a 2.5mm drill bit.  This makes them easy to transport as well as assisting with my next two projects once completed......

Project Salamance Final Post: Field Testing

Finally after waiting longer than I had wanted I took the boards down to the B.I.G. (Brisbane Independent Gamers) weekend.

Played through the Salamanca scenario that we had played before in 15mm and I have to say that the boards were received well by those in attendance.

Design:  Some areas very very few had issues supporting my 6mm stands as I have them on magnet bottom bases making them a bit smoother than Dayle's balsa bases.  Also you can see that there is barely any forces deployed on the right board, this is historically accurate but a rather wasted area.  With most of the french deployed on the left and middle boards the scenario could do with some work to use this fields.

Material: The cloth cover looks great and stands up to close inspection well.  Flocked bases, which all our were did drop loose flock from time to time on the material that required picking off after the battle but that was a minor thing.

All round this was a great battle on a thing of great beauty.  Well worth ever hour spent on it.

Campaign Board Update

Having sculpted the mountain areas and reasonably happy with the look, I am still not sure how the final look with satisfy my requirements.  Time to do a mock up and see if it flies.

I could live with the look, however I need some different coloured clump foliage for the trees so they contrast better with the ground cover.

Sand colour used for the roads was the same as I used on the Salamanca Board but requires a second coat to hide all the blue of the board.  I am not too concerned with the width of the roads at this point as the brown covering can neaten up the paint work.  I have used a deep brown for towns as I am undecided if I will place down buildings (or even able to make such small figures).

Started a section to see what we are looking like on the actual board once finished.  Again different clump is need, its even clearer now.

Burning Rivers: Landscape design and Sculpting

While I am still not entirely happy with the process I am using for my high ground on the campaign map, I am limited in materials and time for the moment and it is just a dumb map before I build the bigger campaign map.

So I gave the tracing a good think, and decided that I would just try and skip a stage.

I first traced the river systems on wax paper.  Including the high ground South Eastern section, I will place high ground around the rivers and not place rivers on the high ground itself.

It then dawned on me that I could use the Weller tool and trace the markings on the paper.  This would then transfer the heat to the foam and we are done.

Tests look good.

So I went to work on the major map, using the narrow straight tip in the Weller kit.







And after I was done the map pages lifted to reveal a map board that only needed a few tough up and it was done.  In hindsight I should have used the narrow "pencil" tip like point and it would damage the foam and paper less.

I marked the river crossings with black marker and with a quick paint job on the rivers taking care to not paint bridges I was done.

Following the same principles with the rivers on the base board, I flipped over the trace paper and marked a mirror copy of the base board into the bottom of the second layer board.  This would result in me being able to cut the foam with a hot wire cutter and know I am cutting out the river valleys.  When I was done I trimmed down the foam to about half size to make sculpting easier and pinned it to the base board to be sure.

A bit more wire cutting to trim down the hills and I was ready to start my sculpting.

Grabbing the Weller Kit hobby tool again (this is sounding more and more like an infomercial for Weller, but the tool is useful), I placed in the flat circle bit and went to work melting back the edges.




And here I am half way completed and stopping to write up this post while its still fresh.

Pre-School helped me Wargame

Last night while hunched over my campaign map pondering how on earth I was going to get the detail accurately placed onto the foam board for me to start work on, I decided to crowd source some ideas so asked the wife.

All Rivers fully traced, I have marked bridges with a intersecting line so I can see when a river ends and when it is crossed by a bridge.

She got old school on me and grabbed some wax paper used in baking, a lead pencil and a picture book of a cat for our sons colouring-in book.  While I was explaining to her that Belgium does have a number of cats but the effect I was going for was a little higher up, maybe a pigeon or a Soviet Satellite would be better, she traced this.

Then flipped the paper over and drew with the lead pencil firmly over the traced lines.  Flipped it back over so the lead pencil markings were now face down on the foam board, grabbed the end of the pencil (rounded) and rubbed along the lines of the cat.

Its no Satellite but it will do nicely.

I grabbed some wax paper, enough to cover the A3 sheet I had to trace off, folding one end to form a perfect 90 degree fold, slipped the A3 page in and tapped.

This would enable me to trace the page with out concern of slight movements messing me about.

As I traced I found I still needed to hold the page flat but it was much easier with the page taped down.



I did this for both pages, focusing on the river systems first, I will paint the roads on free hand.


Now I can flip the page and retrace the rivers with Lead pencil and I will have copied the map onto my war game table perfectly to scale.

I am also going to test using my new Weller Hobby Tool to trace with a fine bit over the paper and see how much it impacts the foam beneath without destroying the wax paper.


Why flip the paper?
If you don't then you end up copying a mirror image of the map, try it and you will see why.

Foam Working Tools

I am always looking for new tools that will make working with foam easier and have found a couple of items that I would not have thought of.

Meat Grinder
Thanks to an idea given to me by Peter from my Tuesday night Napoleonics group, Upholstory Foam placed in a bucket, covered in green paint and then run through a meat grinder will produce a product that will work well as forest cover or Clump Foliage substitute.  Do not use a automatic meat grinder and clean it as soon as your finished to get all the paint out.

I am yet to try this so I will post my outcomes here.

Weller 30W Wood Burning and Hobby Kit
Digging around online the other day I stumbled across a YouTube clip on Pyrography, burning an image onto wood with a very hot tool.  I found this while searching for soldering irons to help cut my many rivers needed for my Waterloo Campaign map project.

http://www.bunnings.com.au/weller-30w-wood-burning-and-hobby-kit_p5910150

While the kit itself lacks a decent length blade to aid in sculpting foam I am confident that I can find a wire or substitute to rig up something.

Project: Waterloo Campaign

I am planning two new projects, the first is a 6mm Quatre Bras battlefield that uses the scenario in my battle report, and the other (this project) is for a Campaign map for our 28mm Empire, Waterloo Campaign due to start in Jan.

So for the Waterloo campaign project I plan to do two boards, the first a smaller model of the final map using scrap materials from my other projects.  This will help me get the scales right and try a few new techniques.

This project will be different than the Salamanca board;

• No cloth covering, I will paint and flock the landscape using clumped foliage for forests.  Mainly because we will only be moving on roads as such the flock will not be worn down.
• No figures will be used on the board, pins will track army movements.
• The function of the map could be covered by a paper map mounted on a cork or foam board.  But were is the fun in blogging about that :)

The Plan

I have located a couple of maps that I will be using to determine layout and terrain.

Firstly Napoleon 4th Edition board game map is perfect for our campaign (I have played the game but here it's a great way to play this campaign period).  This gives me great forest, roads and river layout however due to the lack of contour information  I have to look elsewhere.



A simple web search found me a nice simple high level topographic map of Belgium <here>



I have then roughly cut out the campaign section to work out the hills,

To a final plan that look like this.