Something I’ve been a bit unsatisfied with for some time is the size of the trees on my table; only a few hit 4″ in height, while most are sub-3″. That means the average tree on the table isn’t breaking 40 feet in height at Dropzone scale, while many real tree species hit up to twice that.
That means there needs to be some around the 6″ range to get a more appropriate representation of real trees. Of course, this is for a sci-fi setting, and you can argue that trees on these alien planets can be any sort of unknown or weird species and height! The counterpoint to that is bigger trees look cooler.
Grabbed some 5″-7″ armatures. Pretty easy to work with, they come flat from off the sprue, and the branches are bent into different angles. Main thing is just ensuring there’s roughly 360° coverage, which wasn’t always accomplished.
This is the shit that was recommended with the trees to get the foliage attached, so rather than faff about with trying to make my own cheap adhesive I just grabbed it. You can see some applied to the trees in the earlier picture; supposedly you slap it on, and give it a half hour or so to dry clear, and it remains tacky so the foliage adheres to it.
Ended up having to leave it on the trees for 24 hours before it got as clear as it seemed it would, so this, among other issues, had the whole process taking much longer than expected.
Getting the foliage attached seemed straight forward. Just dip the tree into a pile of the stuff, and the tackiness of the adhesive will coat the tree. That sort of worked.
They look rather nice! But those foliage clumps aren’t really attached that well. After this batch, I found I had to go to each tree and press every individual clump of foliage onto the branches to get a better grip, then very lightly shake to remove the still loose clumps. They sat overnight, and gravity took care of the rest of the not securely attached foliage.
After that, a spray of scenic glue (1:3 matte mod podge to water, with a few drops of dishwasher soap) to try and better secure the clumps to the tree, and another overnight drying time. My experience with the mod podge spray is that it would dry clear. But many of the trees had this gross white residue on them now! Spent a bit of time with a knife scraping off the worst of it, then just gave up and called it done for now. I’ll test giving them a spray of matte varnish once I get to the hardware store to see if that helps with the foliage staying attached at least.
As near as I can tell from online tutorials, this was supposed to be fairly simple, and I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, but in the end despite my complaints I’m happy with the trees once they were set up on the table in preparation for a game in the near-ish future.
Additionally, picked up some metal infantry for Resistance and Shaltari. I love the old metals and will grab them whenever I can.
