Woods for the trees

While I have not been busy posting this past year, I have at least been busy doing a few things. So trying to catch up, this is something I did last summer.

Now the vast majority of my trees have for about two decades been by K&M Trees. They are mounted on resin tree stumps by Snapdragon Studios. Do not bother searching online for the later… they have unfortunately been out of business for around 1 ½ decades.

I always wanted to be able to arrange them into a forest in a way that their bases formed a continuous area, to allow people to tell, what is a forest and what is only a single tree. To achieve this, I glued them onto hexagonal card coasters. Those were cheap (got them for free at a liquor store) and allowed them to be arranged as a continuous area.

But as you can hopefully see in the picture above, this caused a few problems. For one, when you placed the trees with the bases touching, they were unrealistically close to one another. It also meant that you had problems placing infantry in between the trees. If you lifted single trees out, you would always disturb the ones next to them. This would lead to me hardly arranging them this way. Also, with just static grass the bases looked a bit uniform, dull and unrealistic. And last, the edges would curve up over the years, which always made the edges of the bases stand out.

So over the years, I started craving for an improvement. It would have been easiest to simply get me some laser cut MDF hexagonal bases with a larger diameter and do some more groundwork on them, but I wanted to take it a step further.

So I decided to go the sabot way. A base for multiple trees (called the forest base from now on) into which you can place the individually based trees. These are available on the market, but I decided against those for various reasons. Since I wanted to use my own trees, those that came with tree models or did not have the right diameter were ruled out. Same goes for those made from resin, which are generally quite expensive, ruling them out for my needs. In the end nothing generally available did fit my needs. So I turned to Warbases and asked them for some custom forest bases. Which they were able to provide fast and cheap (and as an added bonus with holes for magnetising).

I asked for a very basic almost rectangular design that would either hold three bases with my large trees or six for small model rail road trees (representing saplings or young trees). Since the forest bases are two layers of 2mm MDF they were quite thick which would in turn make them stand out. But everything else was perfect meaning the only preparation still required was adding magnets and sanding the edges down. To speed things up, I used a sanding disc on a disc grinder… very messy work.

So after removing the old bases, filler, static grass, the trees were rebased, a forest floor flock and static grass as well as flower tuffs and bushes added. I did not take photos of the progress, so here are the final results.

As you can see, I also bought some large model railroad trees (birches and popular trees) to break up the monotony as well as a bunch of smaller birches to create some forests more typical of some regions in Russia.

As mentioned before, the trees can be removed to allow easier placement of minis or even tanks.

I also did some bases with just some tree stumps in case I want some bases to appear more open or to hide those brown sabot areas. More bases like these will follow. Those will simply feature some flowers bushes and maybe small mossy rocks.

Above are a few bases to show the individual details. There are three or four trees that were to large for even the large version of the forest bases so these were just based as individual trees, but in the same style.

I will now leave you with some photos of them arranged as larger forests. More can be seen in the previous post from our last game.

I will probably put some iceland moss at the edges of the forests in the future. You usually have more undergrowth at the edges of forests (where there is the most light) and this will both signal the edge of the forest and blend the bases in at the same time.