Starting a fresh fantasy terrain set part two - Trees

I got a bit carried away building scatter terrain for my new fantasy village this weekend. Part of this building fugue consisted of assembling bases to hold a bunch of model railroad trees in an interesting way. Yesterday I painted and flocked the bases. So without further ado, here's the end result.

It's not the glow of the runestone that gets you, its the chanting cultist hiding in the wood with guns that does that...

My apologies for the bunched up pictures of the lot. Going by the rejected pictures, photographing tree bases is most definitely not my strong suit. On the other hand on this shot I get a good giggle out of the dead yellow grass around the buried runestone. Looked at my color wheel and adding orange to the runes was a nice last touch as well. Now there's a copse of trees you shouldn't built a village by...

Someone call for a cultist exterminator? What do you mean he's behind me?

The different colors Icelandic Moss on the bases have been drifting around the 'moss box' (= plastic box for moss) in my selection of flocking materials. They really help break up the green, brown, grey tones. As for gaming, the bases will obviously be spaced slightly farther apart, can help break line of sight and will make it pretty hard for cavalry or monsters to hide in it and claim a silly cover safe. So I'm well satisfied. Now on to the painting bit for those of you interested in painting along. You can read my abuse of careful crafting of polystyrene shapes in this post.

That's a bunch of polystyrene bases covered in primer.

I started out spraying (my favorite) Vallejo German Grey primer on the bases, being very careful not to hit the trees. It took me a while (can't help it, I'm a blonde) to realize I could just pull the trees out of their armatures. In my experience Vallejo primer needs to cure for quite some time (they really should mention this on the bottle). If you don't give it about 24 hours to set you can just wipe it off with you finger. After curing it is excellent stuff. So priming is a thing to do before going to bed :) Also - just in case - never use rattlecan primer on polystyrene unless you want your work to melt (all blessings to the grandfather).

Overbrushing, it's like drybrushing if you don't even feel like properly wiping off your brush. 

For the next step I took a bottle of Dawnstone Dry compound. I keep buying dry paints from GW and they manage to almost always disappoint by drying out (no pun intended) within a few months. Still when they are in proper shape they are quite nice for lazy drybrushing sessions (or in this case overbrushing). I used a humongous make-up brush I bought just for this occasion. I you're interested in painting terrain with a cheap but good drybrush, make-up brushes are the way to go.

Uh oh I might have gone overboard on the 'yellow looks good on rocks' tip I picked up somewhere...

Next up was a drybrush/overbrush with Tyrant Skull (dry). This has rather a lot of yellow in it, so I got a bit worried. Have I overdone it? On the other hand I heard somewhere that a bit of yellow makes rocks look better (so I just kept repeating that until I more or less believed it). As you can see around now I realized I could take the trees off, making my life a lot easier (but that palm to the forehead really hurt).

Just add brown, all will be fine.

Next up I loaded the airbrush with Dryad Bark Air (don't get me started on the idiotic pots holding Citadel Air paints) and carefully sprayed all the sand brown, taking extra care to hit rocks I stuck sand to accidentally according to plan.

Drybrushed and ready for flock, not bad for a lunch break's bit of work.

As a final step I carefully drybrushed the sand with Tallarn Sand and finished up ligthly drybrushing everything with Karak Stone. I picked out the runestone with Sotek Green, and then washed it with Athonian Camoshade. Realizing this shade works on every kind of terrain I added some random splotches off it around the browns and greys. This helped break up the monotomy slightly (it's also rather pointless if you're going to add flock later, but you should never worry about pointless activities while painting plastic toy soldiers and their accessories).

What can I add about adding flock..oh never flock where you paint, or you'll be picking bits of flock out of carefully placed highlights for the foreseeable future.

As a final step (after drying) I used a paintbrush (Winsor and Newton Series 7 extra fine point (just kidding)) to add PVA to the bases, taking care to add no glue beneath the trees. Where trees grow light is blocked, so that tends to look more brownish. On the bit with yellow grass I added the yellow first and then went for the green grass for the base. I also decided to use two tones of green (a dark mix and a very bright mix). Once again this breaks up monotony, and breaking up monotonous areas helps make terrain look interesting. As a last flash of inspiration I glued Icelandic moss to strategic bits and use u dab of PVA to glue each tree solidly into its armature. Then I was off to watch some Babylon 5 and sleep. The next day when the glue had dried I used my airbrush (without paint) to blow excess flock off the bases.