A TREATISE ON TREES

After building hills the next useful piece of terrain you can build is woods. Woods provide cover for your troops, slow down movement, block line of sight, and are great for your troops to hide in. They are the most useful and easiest pieces of scenery you can make for your battlefield.

There are several ways you can make your woods. First off you can make trees from scratch, using wire to make an armature then covering it with masking tape or crepe bandage soaked in plaster of paris. For foliage you can use lichen or steel wire with green flock glued to it. Making your own trees does take time and is fairly messy process, but it is the cheapest method of tree making.

Another way is the tree kits. These provide you with everything you need to make a several realistic looking trees. The trees are made out of either metal or plastic pieces glued together with the foliage which is a flock called coarse turf. Like the home-made trees, this is time-consuming process and is just as messy, but you do end up with realistic looking trees.

The final method is too buy ready-made trees. These are very good, and are much more convenient than making them or buying the tree kits. The ready-made trees come in several sizes ranging from small to very large, come as deciduous trees or conifers, and in several different shades from spring through to autumn (fall). These ready made woods also come with plastic bases which means you can leave them free standing if you wish.

As mentioned before, the ready-made trees come in several sizes. You can use the smaller trees to represent bushes in conjunction with larger trees. To make you woods look realistic use various different types and sizes of tree. Although, if you going for craggy mountain themed terrain board we would recommend just using the conifers or other evergreen trees.

There are a couple of ways you can base your woods. You can base them individually on small round bases. This way you can make up your own wood shapes, and move trees out the way as your miniatures move through. Another method is to put two or three trees in a clump on hardboard base with the smaller trees on the outside and the largest in the middle. The advantage of using a base is you can add scenic extras like rocks, fallen trees and bushes. You have to be careful though not to make the base to busy, as you still need to move miniatures through them.

For some great wood ideas have look at the examples on this page. All of which are show the many different types of bases you can use for your trees.

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Terrain Basics | Obstacles And Barricades | Water Projects | Scenario Objectives