More Woods for the Pile

My previous post on woodland terrain was (surprisingly) well received in some online circles, so I figure I would continue to host up some more as I produce them.  

The Trees Are Alive With the Sound of Warfare

Always best to lead with the finished product!

Building the Base Layer

While the previous few were based on small, 3D-printed forms or cut out of XPS foam, this one was built on ABS sheeting.  I have been working on a variety of different terrain projects lately - mostly buildings - which have made use of 1.5mm thick ABS as a base material, and ended up with a number of off-cuts that were usefully sized but not quite large enough for other things still in the queue.  To form up the base later on this I basically cobbled together a few of the larger scraps, glued them together with some braces, and tried to give it a little more "organic" shape.

Next came the nails, which are the same ones as on previous iterations with the tips ground off.  I had a few of these left over and wanted to use them up - future iterations will probably switch to using wood dowels.  A good dollup of Gorilla Glue - the blue-capped stuff, not the foaming sort - does the trick there.

Overall this was sturdy if a little plain and thin, so the whole thing was reinforced with a healthy layer of wood filler, primed, then given a coat of primer and a base coat of brown.  Krylon Satin Coffee to be exact.  For whatever reason I did not get a shot of anything done before this step, but suffice to say it's a mess of spare parts under there.

In an attempt to make the trunks look a touch more appealing than just flat brown, I brushed on a few cheap craft paint colors real quick and approximated a few different types, and even picked out some errant bits of wood filler on the trunks as being pieces of lichen (which showed up way bright here).

Flocking used much the same approach as before - a coat of Modpodge was used to hold down an interior layer of (used) tea leaves, then the outer was ringed with some grassy flock - this one being from a container I use to store mixed leftovers from earlier projects.  Once that layer had a chance to dry, it was then glued from above via saturation with Scenic Cement - really just heavily watered-down PVA, but I had a bottle of it in the studio I'm trying to burn through anyway.  Once dry, it provided a pretty hard and still interesting base layer, though the glue does mute the colors quite a bit.

Final result is solid, makes use of scrap material that would otherwise end up as waste, and doesn't look too terrible.  It's something like 11" across at the widest points, so approach from that direction in a game of Bolt Action would likely prove a considerable impediment - we tend to run these as Rough Ground and thus infantry only get 6" of movement through it (9" for Tracked vehicles like the Cromwell above).

Building the Canopy Layer

I got almost no WIP shots of this one, for whatever reason.  It was build just like the previous ones were, however - a lump of scrap foam was piled up in the middle-ish of a lid made out of foam core poster board, then the whole thing given some Modpodge and lots of clump foliage on top.  Unfortunately when this got sprayed down the hump in the middle became much more pronounced and, well, "wizard-hat" like.  I'll puff it back out with more stuff eventually but it was kind of funny for a minute so I left it as is.

The edges - and a few troublesome spots throughout that just wouldn't accept PVA glue for whatever reason - got foliage attached with some black hot glue instead.  Once that was done the top was saturated in Scenic Cement - as before I do plan to experiment with other adhesives, but in the meantime I'm working through materials I have hanging around.

Closing

This is the largest one of these I have done to date, and I plan to do at least a few more around this size (and possibly a bit larger) eventually.  Practical limit is just the size of the transport box I haul these around in, and the one I've already been using has a fair bit of room yet still.  Both online and in person I have actually been told a few people liked this idea enough that they wish to copy it - this is great, and means I should probably do a few more iterations of this.

This got used in a game already, and it played well.

As I eluded to above (and you might have seen in the background) I have several other terrain projects in the works that will eventually find their way here when they're complete, as several of them are steadily becoming.