Trees from China

I had purchased some trees and when they arrived I was a little disappointed in that the foliage was quite brittle and didn’t appear to be very well attached; quite a lot had fallen off in the post. However, Tony had bought some similar trees although of a different species and these appeared in the recent Swamp Fox game. They looked superb so I had to know how he had transformed them. This is what he did:

• Make bases i.e. layers of MDF and use a hole cutter on a drill. Or order some pre-cut MDF circles
• Drill hole in middle of base and glue tree in with glue gun
• I also put some dabs of plaster on the base and used my (wet) fingers to make up some roots.
• Change the colour of the trees
• Put down some baking paper on the work top you are using.
• Get a large old style ice cream container (rectangular type).
• Mix up PVA glue, forest green paint and water. A fair amount is needed, more than half but less than 3/4’s of the ice cream container
• Got the forest green paint from “The Range” and used most of a tube.
• Mix the PVA and Paint first and then add the water.
• Dip the top of the tree.
• Tip the container at an angle and spin the rest of the foliage (note you do not need to full cover all of the foliage about 3/4 or 5/6th is good.
• Hold it above the container to let a bit of the mixture to drain
• Put on the baking paper and let dry takes about 1-2 days
• Paint the root structure in a suitable structure and the accessible bit of the trunk and dry brush
• Flock
• Sit back and enjoy your new forest

So I first drilled holes in some 25mm discs from Warbases and glued the trees in place; adding a metal washer to the base to give it some weight to help prevent the trees easily toppling over.
A number of the trees were looking a bit bare in places due to some of the foliage having fallen off so I glued the loose foliage back into place using PVA and left to dry.

Tree with missing foliage

Tree with foliage replaced

Next I mixed up a batch of green paint, PVA and water as per Tony’s instructions, using paint I had from a previous project. The green was a bit too bright so I added brown. 

Instead of dipping the trees as per Tony's method I used a large brush and applied the paint to all the trees and left to dry for a couple of days.
Then it was just a matter of adding filler to the tree bases, painting, dry brushing and adding flock.