Big Trees
Well, since I've finished my gaming table, I've been itching to play some games on it. While I have gotten one game in, I really want to make some new terrain to go with the table. Since I chose grass as my main table surface, it would make sense to make grassy woodland type scenery. Forests are great terrain and they aren't too complicated to make. I have a few, though they've been slightly damaged by my move. I wanted more, however, and I wanted a bit of variety, too.

Sequoias
I recalled seeing some pictures a while back by someone on the Millenium Gate (might have been Panzerwalt, I'm not sure) that featured some really big trees. He used Paper towel and toilet paper rolls as the bottom sections of redwood/sequoia type trees. I felt that the toilet paper rolls were too short and simply looked like giant loggers had come through, but I quite liked the paper towel rolls. Here is one of the original pictures that I worked from in creating mine.

Standing Tall
The first thing I realized was that I was going to have a difficult time getting the trees to stand upright. With such a narrow cross-section, there was very little surface area to glue. I decided to cut out strips of carboard and use them to stabilize the paper towel tubes. I took the strips and folded them in half, gluing half inside the tube and leaving the other half sticking out. After they had dried a while, I went back and glued them to the base. Here the height of the trees worked against me, making them very unstable. I was eventually able to prop various weights on them to keep them upright while the glue dried.

Warp Storm!
Although the original pictures showed cardboard bases, and I had a lot sitting around, I decided to go with a sturdier base material. Not only will a sturdy material protect the rest of the terrain, it also avoids warping. If you use a good amount of glue on cardboard, it will tend to warp as it dries. This will cause it to curl up funny at the edges or bow in the middle, neither of which is useful in terrain pieces. Stiffer material such as particle board doesn't have this problem unless you get it very wet.

That's when I saw it...
Particle board of course comes in rectangular sheets, yet forests are rarely rectangular. I cut the pieces down to size with a radial saw, then I cut off some of the corners with the same saw. After that, the pieces were still way too squarish for me, so I took some clippers and a large knife and cut them down a bit more. Some of the edges I simply clipped off, others I scored (sawed part way through) with the knife and broke them off. This gave me a rougher edge than the parts I did with the clippers. While I didn't want to spend too much time and energy making the bases smooth and rounded, I did want to break up the straight lines a bit. (Note: no humans were harmed in the making of this terrain. When using knives and saws and other dangerous implements, use caution, cut away from yourself, etc. Don't make me tell your mommy.)

Topping it off
The trees would look a bit funny if I left them hollow, and I didn't think I'd be able to make a plug purely out of spackle for them. I traced a paper towel tube onto some cardboard and cut out the pieces. Then I simply glued them to the top of each tree. Voila! Now that I think about it, however, a good companion piece would be a toilet paper tube with some jagged cuts in it and left topless to represent a hollowed out old tree, perhaps hit by lightning. Hmm, I'll have to save that idea for later!

Giving them character
I picked up some light spackle to cover the paper towel tubes with and carve the bark into. Even though I purchased light spackle, it was still too thick to put on the tubes directly. After some thought I watered it down and sort of "glopped" it on, making sure that most of the tube was covered. I knew there would be some areas left uncovered, but as long as they were small, they'd simply look like natural knots and things in the tree bark.

Worse than it's bite...
My original plan was to take a comb and run it through the spackle, giving the appearance of deeply lined bark. My lovely assistant Marissa however, suggested that we texture the spackle instead. It worked better than my original plan, so that's what we did. We simply let the spackle dry slightly, then lightly pressed our fingers into it. As we pulled back, the spackle stuck to our fingers and created a nice texture. (Note: wear gloves, that's what we did. I like my hands, thankyouverymuch!)

Colorizing it
While I'm doing a snow theme for my Tau, these trees are supposed to be for a grassy woodland. Since that was the case, I picked up some brown spraypaint for the trees themselves, and some green for the base. While I planned to put flock on the base, the flock doesn't always get perfect coverage, and green paint would camouflage that nicely. Since I didn't need to worry about details much, it was easy to simply spray the paint on and let it dry. (Note: Spray carefully, don't spray in confined spaces and make sure you have something to keep the overspray from decorating whatever area you are painting in.)

Adding some foliage
The trees by themselves look a little plain and, with large open areas around them, don't look like they'd block much line of sight. That's where foliage comes in. I picked up some aquarium plants at a pet store and cut them up and glued them around the base to add some fern-like decorations to the base. While it still leaves plenty of room to move models through, it does break up the open area a bit and it helps the terrain piece look more lifelike.

Sprinkling on the grass
The final step was to apply some watered down PVA glue (White glue for us statesiders) to the base and sprinkle on the flock. While those tubs of flock go a pretty long way, a lot of flock will simply not get glued down. It's best to recover this for re-use later. I put my trees on a piece of plastic to catch the extra that I shook off, then poured it back in the tub. (Taking care to watch for clumps of glue. Don't want those in there.)

I can see the forest!
There, now I've finished the big trees. While they aren't enough by themselves to provide 25% terrain coverage for my table, they are a good start, and a good-looking set of terrain if I do say so myself.

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