Quick and cheap winter trees

Something I've been meaning to do for ages is to add some winter trees to my terrain collection.  Very much motivated by reading about the combat in Hungary in the last winter of the Second World War I got on and did it.

Two things enabled this.  The first was picking up a dirt cheap Christmas tree ornament for only £1.49, the second was being sent a free pack of suitable bases from the lovely people at Warbases as part of their marvellous Helping Hands initiative.  The bases were the real catalyst.  They were waiting for me when getting home from work on Monday afternoon and I did steps 1 and 2 that evening.  I did nothing on the Tuesday and worked on them for 15 minutes here and there during the day to finish them on the Wednesday doing steps 3 to 7. 

Here's the steps:

1. Prepare the trees.  Using a pair of snippers I cut each branch as low as possible from the ornament.  This gave me 20 trees.  I also gave each tree a good hard brushing to get rid of the horrible snow effect plastic that they were covered in and that was shedding everywhere.

2. Prepare the bases.  These are 90x52mm sized 3mm deep oval bases.  First off I roughly bevelled the edge of each base using a Stanley knife with a tough blade.  I then sanded each edge to increase the bevel.

3. Drill the holes.  I started doing these with my trusted old pin vice and a 2.5mm drill bit, but soon got the dremel out with a 3mm bit and made life easier for myself.  I drilled 4 holes per base.

4. Prime the bases.  To stop any potential warping I painted both the top and bottom of the bases with cheap craft paint from The Works.  I did consider leaving it at that but went on to...

5. Texture the bases.  I mixed up some of the craft paint with some cheap tiling grout I've had for ages.  This has seen far more use making terrain than tiling!  I liberally glooped this on thinking about snow drifts and cream scones...


6. Attach the remaining trees.  I'd carefully kept the holes free as I'd added the grout mix.  After waiting for the mix to dry, I had to trim the ends of the trees to fit in the holes.  Once I'd got them right, I squeezed super glue all round and stuck them in, taking care I hadn't stuck them to the cutting mat.

7. Add extra texture to finish.  I then added some more grout mix around the base of the trunks, but also on the trees themselves.  This worked much better than I thought, and has adhered really well.  


Comments

  1. Anonymous30 January 2025 at 13:47

    Very effective 👍🏼✔️. I assume there was no need to paint the ‘snow’ on the bases?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Richard30 January 2025 at 18:16

    A great tutorial. Thank you. Inventive to use Christmas decorations.

    ReplyDelete

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