How to build jungle trees for wargaming

I need a lot of terrain for my upcoming Pulp Alley campaign. I did some research on the internet. Inspired by Dr.Mathias tutorial, I made up a plan to build some jungle trees for wargaming.

Building the base

For the trunk I used some plastic tubes, instead of PVC pipes. The length of the tubes was just fine, so no sawing was required. I hot glued them on some round foam core bases. To achieve a more realistic look and to add more stability, I hot glued some roots to the base. Pretty simple and effective.

  

Adding some structure

After the first steps, our trees did’t really look like trees. At this stage of the project, they could be easily seen as weird rockets on a launch pad. To prevent that, we need to add some structure to the trunks. I used toilet paper and white glue for that. This method is messy and  needs quiet a long time to dry, but it’s pretty effective. The toilet paper adds some nice structure to the trunk. The roots also look far more realistic now. You can easily shape the structure with a brush or even your fingers.

Adding some color

I let the trunks dry for almost a day. After that I painted the whole trees brown, using acrylic house paints from the home improvement store. I mixed white glue, filler, acrylic paint and some water and add it to the base. Besides that, I hot glued some rocks to the base and painted them grey. After that I washed the whole piece, using a dark wash. Followed by a heavy dry brush with Vallejo Beige Brown (875) and a second lighter dry brush with Vallejo Tan Earth (874).

There is nothing wrong with the result, but honestly in retrospect I would add sand instead of filler to gain more surface structure. Filler tends to be more flat, which makes dry brushing really hard. Because of that the base is lacking depth and looks more like concrete. I would also suggest to mix a lighter wash, because the one I used was pretty heavy and darkened the piece too much. Anyway, maybe it’s just a matter of personal taste.

Finishing the base

In the final step I used a variety of basing materials like flock etc. to add more detail to the base.  Like always, I used watered down PVA (50:50) for the job.  For size comparison, I added two 28mm pulp figures to the scene. Both characters will take part in my upcoming pulp campaign, so stay tuned. And now some pics of the jungle trees for wargaming.

 

I hope you like the finished product. Maybe you need a river as well? The gentleman with the hat is part of the League of Adventurers, my first league for Pulp Alley.

I’m probably leaving out some information. What other tips can you provide about this issue? Leave it in the comments!