Trees for Ogre Miniatures

[Mack_JB]

I had posted this in anther forum since it trickled back into my memory ...

Since we now have the new minis, scenery to play them with becomes more important. This is a common method we used for architectural models to make inexpensive trees in the 3/4" to 1.5" height.


Materials:
Clump foam from Woodland Scenics in a medium green color.
Box of nails or brads, we often used finishing nails.
Quart of a nice foliage color of latex house paint (just the cheap stuff, not a fancy brand).
Can of brown spray paint.
Large mixing bowl.


First spray paint the nails a brown bark color, we used a piece of florist's foam to push the nails into and spray bombed them. Let dry thoroughly.

Next put a bag or two of the clump foam in the large mixing bowl (preferably metal for later cleaning).

Mix the clump foam with an amount of the foliage colored latex housepaint, and get yourself a gloppy mix of chunky goop made.

This mix needs to be a bit thick, so it holds shape. Then you take balls or wads of the goop and place it around the head of a nail, usually about 2" long, though wood dowels work too.

The goop hardens when the paint dries, and you have a ball shaped tree foliage, which you can then drybrush for highlights, or better, flock with the finest ground foam while they are still wet. We used to get trees down to about 3 cents each that way.


Links:

Clump Foam:
https://woodlandscenics.woodlandscen...egory/GCBushes

Fine Turf:
https://woodlandscenics.woodlandscen...egory/FineTurf

This sort of Nail:
https://www.lowes.com/pd/Grip-Rite-2...s-1-lb/3043033


For gaming, I'd suggest though that you get longer roofer's nail with the large head, and use the head as the base, so the head can be glued to a larger base, either for single trees or groups of trees.
https://www.lowes.com/pd/Fas-n-Tite-...-lbs/999996356

[TheAmishStig]

I've got about 4 boxes of those things in the basement from when the previous owner redid the molding...

Did you also do anything to blunt the nails, or was it more of a "Don't faceplant onto the table unless you want to be a pincushion"?

[Mack_JB]

Depending on which nails you mean?

We always used them 'point down' and pressed into the 2# urethane foam used as the scenery base (contour maps cut in-house).

If you were to use the roofing nails on a base, 'point up', with the ground foam blob on the top, the foam does gets pretty hard, maybe not like a rock, but hard enough the nail would be hard to poke through.

[TheAmishStig]

I've got both, but was looking at the finishing nails specifically.

It'll be a while before I can act on it because I'm still puttering with bright ideas...such as mixing and matching scales to denote the difference between "This structure has SP and you're able / supposed to shoot at it" and "This is town terrain"...but good to know. Since I want to keep the random elevated bits to a minimum, I'll probably end up creating stumps rather than driving them into terrain bits.

The nice thing is nails have such a wide range of sizes that I'm not locked into bags of the same 3 trees over and over again [albeit at the cost of increased time].

[Mack_JB]

The same process of making the "green glop" for trees can be used to make spreadable ground cover on say, hexes or groups of hexes, as terrain. You'd have in essence a 3D version of the forest hexes on the ODE maps.

[Mack_JB]

Originally Posted by TheAmishStig

The nice thing is nails have such a wide range of sizes that I'm not locked into bags of the same 3 trees over and over again [albeit at the cost of increased time].

Years back, when we knew we were going to need lots of trees for a project, our secretary would start make them while answering the phone ... this is a project you can do sitting in front of the TV while vegetating.

[ColBosch]

Do you have a picture of the finished product?

[Mack_JB]

Sadly, no pictures since I haven't needed to make any in almost twenty years, the bottom dropped out of making architectural models for the most part. I'd have to go back to the shop and get some of their pics to scan, which is easy enough if you really want to see some pics.

Dug around a bit online, these two images show the style of tree in an N scale display for a kit they sell:

http://www.laserkit.com/images/614PR.jpg

http://www.laserkit.com/images/619.jpg

Those used paneling nails, the ones with the ribbed shanks, and they were rolled in the fine turf foam before they dried.

They're purely for mass effect and size, they don't have branches, see through areas, etc.; but they work great for gaming.

[ColBosch]

If you don't mind, that would be great. At the least, I want to do up some dioramas for displaying my painted pieces.