Making Pine Forests

There is something about having large trees as terrain pieces that really lifts the look of a table. In the real world, trees tower over houses and other buildings. They often dominate a skyline. If I can achieve something of that with a game table then I think it goes a long way to giving it a more natural look. Sometimes, it doesn't even require that many tall trees.

On other occasions, it can require a lot of trees, especially if playing in the Far East.

So, when it came to starting a Chain of Command campaign set in the Hurtgen Forest, I needed to give serious consideration to how I wanted to represent those pine forests. 

I never planned to achieve a look this dense, but I wanted to at least capture something of the visual aspect. After all, it is such a distinctive feature of contemporary photographs from the battle. 

A few years ago I created several bases of pine trees for the Bloody Bucket campaign, which is set in the Ardennes. Pine trees are a feature of many European landscapes, be it areas like the Ardennes and Hurtgen Forest, or further east in Prussia and western Russia. It's not as if I wouldn't find a use for them in other settings.

Originally, I bought a box of relatively cheap trees of varying heights from a seller on eBay.

I lightened their colour and based them in groups of two and three.

They served their purpose well enough for our Bloody Bucket games.

That was all great, until someone at our club (yes Mac, I'm looking at you) turned up with pine trees with much longer trunks. What a difference it seemed to make. They had the extra height, which I think is so effective, but more importantly, they really looked the part. That's the look I wanted for the Hurtgen Forest games, so down the rabbit hole I jumped.

There's nothing out of the ordinary here in terms of their construction. It really is just a matter of adding a top piece of pine foliage to a straight piece to represent the trunk and then putting them on a base. I decided I would do this with the existing trees I had, but I would also need to order more. 

The thing about trees is that, in most cases, they are scale agnostic. A tall tree for a 20mm figure.....

....is a not so tall tree, for a 28mm figure.

As always, storage is an issue and so I figured this into my plans. Construction is straightforward enough, given the trees arrive ready made.

I find the tree colour a bit dark and I like to break up the single colour tone with a highlight. I do that using my airbrush and lightly spray Yellow Green. I spray at an angle, always pointing the airbrush down when spraying from above. The idea is to only cover the lighter, upper surface of the foliage. 

 

I'm adding only a single colour, but it does a great job of giving some tonal variation to each tree.

The trunks were made from different thickness of wood dowel, bought in bags from a local craft store.

I cut them to size using The Chopper, my trusty cutting tool that is perfect for terrain jobs like this.

To make the most efficient use of storage space, the trees won't be permanently attached to the bases. Those bases were made from MDF, cut in random shapes and with their edges chamfered for a more natural look. 

To make a simple plug to attach the tree base I used pieces of round toothpick. I used a pin vise to drill a suitably sized hole in the end of each piece of dowel and in the MDF base where each tree would be located.

I did this at both ends because that is also how the tree foliage will be attached.

I have a ready supply of toothpicks on hand for many jobs, I find them very useful.

It's then just a matter of using PVA glue to attach a small length of the toothpick into the end of the dowel.

The wood dowel is a little too perfectly round for my liking and so I roughed them up a bit with a craft knife.

In particular, I slightly tapered the ends, where the foliage will be inserted.

Next, they were all painted with a brown acrylic paint.

When dry they were washed with Citadel's Agrax Earthshade, but to be honest, any dark brown wash would do. 

At this point the natural wood grain of the dowel shows up, as does the work done with the craft knife.

The final stage is to glue in the top foliage and give the trunks a gentle dry brush with a pale grey colour.

The bases were textured with sand and then flocked, in the same way as I do all my basing, so that figures and other pieces of terrain can also sit comfortably together - be they in 20mm or 28mm.

Despite the extra box of trees, I found creating a convincing forest on a 6x4 table was still a challenge. I needed to pad it out with various other trees from my collection to achieve a convincing density. While I don't think I quite captured the appearance of the photographs, I think it gave a good impression.

I felt it worked particularly well from a figure's perspective and was suitably atmospheric. As it turned out, and this was something quite unintentional, these taller trees actually helps with figure placement, so they have proven functional as well. That's a good result in my book!