Scenic Distractions IV

Can I Get A Forestry Service Merit Badge For This?

Since I stay home with my kids, on my birthday my wife gives me a day to just go out and pursue my interests kid free which usually involves trying to hunt out a new hobby shop in my region that either I have never been to before or possibly haven't been to in years.  I really lucked out this year and found a huge gaming store about 45 minutes from my house, Huzzah Hobbies.

Great Rao! The tornado swept almost all the trees off the hillside...

The amount of planning I did to have one forested hillside blend in to the other for times when these tiles are used as one big hillside makes we wonder why I never went into a career in forest management.

They have an amazing selection of not just Games Workshop and Fantasy Flight products but also tons of board games, smaller game systems, modeling supplies, and lots of great space to play games.  I got an unknown birthday wish fulfilled because I found large trees.  For my happiness at this discovery to make sense, you should know that two years ago I got a bag of well made model train trees for a very good price when a Hobby Works store near me went out of business. The trees are made by JTT Scenery products which is primarily a model train scenery manufacturer but their products are very high quality at a reasonable price (especially at 50% off in a closeout sale). There were 24 small trees in that bag and I had used them sparingly to decorate one of my hill sections and was planning to use the remaining trees to make a small copse or two that could be used as scatter terrain.  

I carefully measured tree placement on the second hill with a rhino to make sure you could still drive a tank up the hill betwixt the rock walls and forest...

However my birthday luck led me to finding a bag of 18 trees in the same style, by the same company in three larger sizes than the trees I had picked up a few years ago.  Now I could create two forested hillsides on my large hill tiles, along with having more than enough trees to create two small forests for scatter terrain.  Also, having multiple sizes of trees made the forested hillside (and future scatter-able forests) more realistic in appearance with the varying sizes of the trees.  

Pink flowers, purple flowers, blue rocks, green hills... I may be straying into Lucky Charms territory here

I went to work that evening revamping my one finished hillside and the second hill still under construction to see what kind of new look I could achieve.  The trees have a heavy wire trunk under brown paper to make it look like bark.  Using my pin vise drill, I gently drill a small hole through the layers of sand, glue, paint, and foam and then fill the hole with PVA glue.   After that I place the trunk into the "ground" and use some flock or static grass on the glue that pushes out of the hole when the trunk goes in.  As you can see in the pictures above I was now able to cover the "front" of the hill in a variety of tree sizes, although I went lighter on one side to ensure a Rhino sized tank could still make it up the hill.  For the final touch I used another score from the Hobby Works going out of business sale: flower flock!  I will buy almost anything for the hobby at the right price.  For $2 there was no way I could pass up four bags of brightly colored tiny flock made to be sprinkled on trees or the ground in model train layouts to simulate flowering blossoms, even though at the time I had no idea what I would do with them.  Several of the trees got sprayed with PVA glue and then sprinkled with pink or purple flock because SCIENCE FICTION!  Space color choices aside, the colored flock added another bit of variety to the look of the trees on the hillside and had another bonus effect.  Some of the blossoms sprinkled off of the trees while I was placing them and the nature of the flock meant it was them hard to sweep off the textured surface.  However they just looked like the circle of blossoms that would normally be under any blooming tree in nature, so one more accidental trip in the direction of visual realism.

Blue rocks because... SPACE!

Thanks for coming along on this ride as I continue to craft scenery with the cutting edge techniques of the early 1990's  :-)

Squad Azreath moved down the hillside carefully scanning the woods for any sign of ambush as their Razorback followed down the slope...