The Forestry Commission

The woods discussed earlier are finally beginning to take shape! So far I've managed to finish a swampy section using a couple of Heki tall trees bounted on a Warbases long vehicle base, and two copses of Noch mixed trees mounted on 4Ground's forest bases with removable sections.

These are quite a handy idea, to allow figures to be easily deployed or moved through the woods; simply move some of the trees out of the way and place them around the figures to preserve the effect! the bases themselves come in two halves, a slightly larger lower section, and a smaller top section with removable blanks. The two sections are glued together, and the blanks taken out, and then simply posistion the trees to suit. If you weren't sold on the removable idea, you could just keep the blanks in situ, and fill the very slight gaps around them. For 28mm skirmish games I don't see any great need to remove the trees, as an average sized unit of individually based figures will comfortably fit around the trees, but they'll come into their own for smaller 15mm games with troops based in groups, or for moving vehicles through.

The swamp itself was created by leaving a blank area of MDF surrounded by filler. This blank area was painted Humbrol 29, and some ripples added using Revell matt varnish that had gone all thick and gloopy. Once set, this was painted with successive layers of Tamiya transparent paints (yellow, red, blue, green) until I arrived at a shade I was happy with. Then a couple of coats of Tamiya clear gloss to complete the effect. Some Army Painter Swamp Tufts were added for long grass/reeds growing up through the water. I'm quite happy with the effect achieved.

Small Copse:

Trees removed:

Large Copse:

I'd painted the tree trunks and roots of all the trees, just to improve the general look from a blanket semi-gloss brown with no definition, to something a bit more representative of bark. I stopped short of adding moss, though... Base coat of some Humbrol 29 with a bit of H33 black added, then some stripes of H29, and then some stripes of H29 with a bit of white H34 added

Trees removed

The swamp in particular had been designed with Muskets and Tomahawks North American wilderness setting in mind for 28mm games, but should be equally usefull as German forest for 20mm Cold War games or similar. The other copses were reasoned at being pretty multi-purpose. I've still got a bag of Woodland Scenics Connifer kits to do, which should make perfect German woods, as well as plety of left-over Noch trees from the packets used to make the copses. These will be added to the off-cuts of MDF that surrounded the cut-out shapes, as they're nice and irregular, and too big not to do something with. Combined with the two main stands of trees, that should give me a decent sized forest for a fairly modest outlay.

Trees with 28mm figures

Equally effective with 20mm

And also with 15mm

Cheers for now
Iain.