Trees on the Cheap, Part II

Posted by gbprime on 20. May 2009 13:21

Okay, here's the down and dirty of it.  For those of you tuning in late, the goal here is to make 18 woods sections complete with flocked bases, 36 trees and 36 bushes... all for 39 $US.  Today I cover the construction of the trees themselves.

Start by drilling 6 small holes in a GW round base, cutting 3 lengths of floral wire, and pulling 3 sprigs of greenery off the bunch you grabbed at a discount craft store.  Take care to leave a section on the underside of the round base large enough to hold one of the magnets.  (More on that later.)

Use floral tape to bind the 3 sprigs into a bunch as shown, and loop the 3 wires through the GW round base like so.  The wires will hold the tree  firmly onto the base so that even rough handling and ill placed tanks cannot damage the tree.

Place the bundle of greenery on the base and wind the three wires around it.  I find that making one of the wires go the opposite direction from the other two adds stability to your tree, as well as forcing the smaller branches out and away from each other.  Finish the top of the tree off by wrapping 1 wire around each of the sprigs of greenery, so that you get 3 large branches at the top of the tree going out in different directions.

Now take a bit of floral tape and wrap the tree trunk.  It'll take a little practice to get the tape to go around the branches, but this too helps spread them out to make it look more tree-ish.

Tear off a bit of floral clay and cover the tree trunk.  You can leave this step off if you're pressed for time or otherwise like the look of the floral tape tree trunk, but the clay allows you to texture the trunk a bit and allows you to create "roots" to cover up the wire and the slot in the GW round base.  Give it a few days to dry so it's not sticky before you work with it further.  It will never be as hard as sculpy or Green Stuff miniature clay, but it's a heck of a lot cheaper.

Fill the bottom of the GW round base (or the large half of the bottom if it has a slot bisecting it like mine) with more clay.  Be sure to mush it in there real well, so that it flows around the wire in the base.  once it dries, the wire will hold the clay in place.  (if you find this isn't the case and your clay keeps coming out... superglue it.)  BEFORE it dries, make an indent in the clay for your rare earth magnet, then glue the magnet in place once the clay is hardened.

Behold, one tree.  And a very excited Kroot Mercenary for scale comparison.

Coming up in Part III... painting and flocking trees.