I’ve built some outdoor terrain (like this board, campsite, and rock formations, or this hill with scatter terrain), but have been lamenting the lack of trees to lay out around them. I’ve been planning to make some – and still plan to do so – but I couldn’t resist the lure of a set of inexpensive starter trees purchased online.

I started looking around at model railroading trees on Amazon after reading recommendations that O or S gauge – or scales around 1:50 – were appropriate for 28mm gaming. I settled on this set because it listed a wider range of sizes than the other ones I looked at, and for now I didn’t want to bother with pines or anything flowering or exotic. They didn’t include any kind of bases, but I was going to make my own even if they did, and sixteen trees for $13 seemed like a pretty good price point.

They looked pretty good on arrival, though a couple of them oddly had patches of different shades of flocking that ended up making them look sort of blotchy unless the shadows are falling just right to make it look like the brighter patches are a result of sunlight hitting the treetops. Some of the flocking started coming loose as soon as I started to handle them – which I’m led to believe is common for purchased trees. The photo above shows them jammed into a block of foam to prep them for a few coats of sprayed-on 50/50 water and PVA glue, which seemed to do the job of making the foliage more resilient.

Rounding the Bases

To base the trees I started by clipping the tabs on the bottoms down to little nubs. With hot glue, I started attaching 1″ washers for weight to some craft-store thin wood discs of assorted sizes. At the center of each washer I hot-glued a tree, then built up a mound of glue around it to better secure the tree and to cover the washer and its edges. This arrangement left them firmly attached and resistant to falling over.

I went with a few different methods of shaping the bases from there. Most were coated with a mix of spackle, white glue, and playground sand, to build up a little textured mass. For one or two, I used hot glue for the same purpose, and for several more I just glued some soil-and-grout mix (inspired by Luke’s APS) right to the wood. I then used the glue gun as a sort of sculpting tool, leaving little blobs at the base of the trees and drawing them out to the edges to form roots protruding from the ground. I also glued a few small rocks here and there.

All the bases were painted brown next, including the tree trunks and the more visible branches. This was topped off by a light dry-brushing with a tan color to bring out some texture.

For most of the bases I thought they needed a little more ground texture so I used a paint brush to spread some white glue on the non-root areas, and soil-and-grouted them up. (For some reason the darker grout was hard to find locally, and the mid-tone stuff dried lighter/sandier than I’d hoped, so I ended up only leaving a little bit of it showing.) Next step was to sprinkle on the grass flock.

Reaching the point where I had a bunch of decent-looking trees on grassy bases with rocks and roots showing, I started thinking about other decorative bits to add – some bushes from craft-store moss, or some bits of chopped-up dollar-store flowers. But I’d been planning for a while to invest in some grass tuft products to spruce up my outdoor pieces, and I decided this would be a good time to do so.

Tufts from Shadow’s Edge Minis were highly recommended in a couple of crafting groups, so I checked them out. Though some of the information on their site was confusing – they had a separate page showing examples of colors by name, but those names didn’t necessarily match their products’ color names – they did have, as it turns out, exactly what I wanted: assorted sampler packs of both grass and flower flocking. Since I don’t do terrain in volume and wanted a variety of looks to choose from, this was an economical way to get all the tufts I’ll need for some time.

After scattering a few flower beds and grass clumps among the bases, I was rather pleased with the overall results!