Can’t See the Wood for the Trees (2)

Following on from my earlier post I have been making trees to get a break from painting ACW figures.

Readers may recall that in the experimental tree I used a trunk made from Sculpey and I was quite happy with that. But I had a whole bunch of bare trees - sans foliage - that I made way back in 2005 when I put on a refight of Pea Ridge. That battle was fought in the  winter, so I built a collection of winter trees, some from Woodlands Scenics but the most I scratch built - all trunks and bare branches.  players in that game will remember it clearly because when moving troops in the woods they were likely to be stabbed by one of the trees. These have been sitting in the garage since that time and I thought why couldn’t these be repurposed by adding foliage using the same method described earlier.

This was the cause of another experiment where I took the bare tree, that was a wire armature....

Added the coconut fibre foliage shape and coated it with Woodlands Scenics coarse turf, conifer.

I liked the effect, but it needed some tone. I thought first of applying a lighter green turf, but chose instead to lightly spay the foliage with a bright yellow. Spraying this from a distance provided just enough of a highlight and has the added advantage of helping to secure the foliage.

So with this second experiment completed I set about adding foliage to another seven bare trunks.

The same trunks with their coconut matting foliage attached, ready to be sprayed black.

Then with the flock applied

And finally with a light spray of bright yellow.

Soon I had a wood, or at least a copse.

Finally, just in case regular readers were concerned that I was ignoring the ACW project, here is a standard sized Union cavalry regiment and a small Confederate one.

Now that the number of units in this project is stacking I think I need to organise a game to see if the vignette basing idea is going to work, before rebasing becomes too much if a chore.