How to: Jungle Trees

Hi, welcome to my small tutorial on how to make nice and easy jungle trees with a minimum of materials and tools. The idea for making jungle trees came from a quick visit to a cheap discount store, where I stumbled onto a cheap aquarium plant boll used for house decoration. Back at home I sourced some twigs from my twigs collection (make sure you use fully dried twigs) and started my first attempt of making large jungle trees using the purchased aquarium plants. 

First of all I cut out the hardboard bases for the trees using some metal pliers you can also use a handsaw but as this sort of soft hardboard is easy to cut I used the pliers as they are easier to handle without much hassle. When the bases are finished by also sanding the edges, I hotglued the trees on the bases, making sure they were balanced out and couldn't fall over. After that I have added texture using a layer of diluted woodglue covered with fine sand and gravel. 

The hardest part of collecting the most suitable twigs is already done and most of the preparation work is also done so we can now paint the entire piece using a light brown color for the entire piece including both the tree and base. When the basic layer is dry we heavily drybrush the entire piece using a large flat brush with a cream color. 

When the paint is fully dried we can now hotglue the plastic foliage in place by carefully putting small bits of hotglue on the desired place and sticking the plastic plants in place. We do this untill the full tree is covered with the plastic foliage as desired. After that we also hotglue some plastic plants on the base representing undergrowth and low vegetation and also add some static grass and clump foliage which we attch with wood glue. 

The finished pieces ready to be used in your wargame, the same techniques can also be used for making undergrowth bases (the strange looking plant in the last picture is a pine apple heavily drybrushed with a cream color) . Although you need some basic skills making these bases is possible for everybody using the right tools. And by doing it yourself you can save some money as these bases roughly costed a couple of euros in materials. Also found these pictures of the pieces being used in a colonial game.

More tutorials can be found here