If one of them breaks, I can make the “Quarantree must have expired” joke…

I’m lucky enough to have a job that can be done remotely, so I’m still collecting a paycheck during the current Coronapocalypse. What’s odd is that the long-term work-from-home thing has made working hours more fluid, and between that and a series of rushed deadlines, I end up dedicating significantly more time to work stuff than I did before. So I’d hoped that the lack of a commute and the ability to sleep a little later in the morning would give me time and energy to get a huge amount of crafting and mini painting done… but that hasn’t happened.

Not that I’ve been idle, though. The minis still languish in stacked boxes in a corner, but I’ve made substantial progress in a relatively new terrain project, started another one, and finished up one that’s been sitting partly done for a while now. This post is about that project.

Because I can never have enough trees

I’ve built up a fair collection of tabletop trees over time (as documented here, here, here, and here). But it seems I’ve developed an addiction, because a few months ago I ordered even more – a cheap pack of some small ones from Wish.com. When they arrived I realized they were even smaller than I’d expected, pretty much entirely uniform, and not really bendable or twist-able to create variety.

After a mild winter, the flowering cherry tree in my front yard was in full white-and-pink bloom already by late March, and it provided inspiration on what to do with these. I decided to try to turn them into something that looks like flowering trees, perhaps in some well-attended garden (to explain the relative sameness in shape and layout of them all).

I started off by spray-painting them white, with the intention of adding grey or brown to the trunks and branches. The paint didn’t cover the greenery very well, but this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing because it wouldn’t hurt to have leaves showing. I tired black and brown washes in an attempt to subtly shade and color the wood parts, but at some point I decided I wanted to make these look just a little more alien or fantastical than run-of-the-mill trees, so I also added a purple wash… which for some reason became the prominent color.

I looked around for a suitable flocking material to make the flowers. I think the ideal solution would have been some static-grass style flocking but in pinks and whites. I didn’t have that, so I tried regular snow flock instead, sprinkling it on after a applying some spray adhesive to the trees. The results weren’t terribly cherry-tree-like in terms of the perceived texture after the initial application of white – in fact, they pretty much just looked like trees with a bunch of snow on them.

Next I put some of the snow flock into a little plastic container and gradually stirred in some pink paint, trying to keep it as dry as possible while still saturating it with color. I managed to get a decent powdery mix that wasn’t too clumpy, and after another shot of spray adhesive, sprinkled it on.

The bases for these turned out to be a little tough at first. I’d hoped to be able to just slap a small washer as ballast onto a wood disc and use hot glue to affix the trees and create a little texture around the bottom. However, the glue and trees just didn’t want to cooperate, leaving be with either crooked trees or EZ-break connections to the bases. I ended up cutting some small XPS foam scraps with holes punched in the centers and gluing those down to the bases. This way I could fill the holes with glue and poke the tree-trunks into them, providing more surface area for adhesion and some side support as well.

Then I melted hot glue to build up little mounds around the bases, so my trees wouldn’t look like they were jammed into blocks of foam.

From there, it was just a matter of brushing some PVA onto the bases and adding my grout mix, then applying some grass after it set.

So overall not exactly what I’d pictured, but not too bad. I’m sure they’ll get some use on the table.