Rangers of Shadow Deep Nest Trees

The second scenario in the first Rangers of Shadow Deep mission calls for four 'Nest Trees' with the possibility of a fifth turning up during the game.  

I've said previously that I'm avoiding building or painting anything too specific for RoSd, but these can be mixed in with other trees in any woodland and they will fit in very nicely in any MESBG scenarios set in Mirkwood.

The Original Trees

I didn't want to scratch build trees, so I used pre flocked plastic trees from a bag I got on Wish. I know a lot of stuff on Wish is poor quality or even outright scams, but these were OK. This bag of mixed sizes might well appeal to thrifty gamers, but if you buy it for 28mm gaming you'll find the trees are small. I got them for smaller scale games, and some will be appearing in 6 and 10mm Fantastic Battles. For the nest trees I'm happy for them to be on the small size for 28mm, I think they'd make impressive 15mm trees.

Sample tree straight from the pack. Very regular and very green 

Preparation

Now the colour of the flock is, being kind, 'garish', and I wanted dead looking trees anyway. A bowl of very hot water softened the glue holding it on, and some laborious picking off soon got rid of it. I was actually impressed with how good the glue was, I've had experience with similar trees where a light draft blows most of the flock off. 

I also took the time to bend some of the branches out a bit, warming thoroughly in more very hot water, then setting the new pose in cold water.

The trees need bases, I've used GW 40mm bases and 60mm MDF in the past. These are 50mm plastic bases from Reaper, included in their recent Kickstarters (I use clear bases for my Reaper stuff, so these are surplus).  A hole nearish the centre for the end of the trunk, then hot glue both underneath and a bit round the top to keep it in place. Originally I planned to use the glue gun to melt the plastic trunk a bit to shorten it and provide a better fix, but the plastic wouldn't melt just with my hot glue gun. I ended up trimming with scissors to give different height trees.

Based and ready for painting

Painting

After basing the trees were given a black prime from a rattle can. Then a heavy brown dry brush (because most people think tree trunks are brown), followed by a grey dry brush (because most tree trunks are actually greyish).

Webs

If I'd thought ahead, I'd have got some of those Halloween fake spider webs, but I didn't.

Instead, I'm using herbal T-bags. These aren't the 'paper' ones you usually find (which actually can contain plastic), but a more 'fabric-y' looking material.  I suspect they are more common in 'exotic' teabags - these were a gift.  I don't know what they are made of, but if unused, they can be teased out to give a reasonable web effect.  The contents will come in useful later, so they are put on one side.

The tea bags in tea bag form, opened out, and teased apart to make webs

This seems to look best when some of the material is caught on the branches, then pulled out before reattaching it further along the tree. It can also be teased out by hand,  just experiment and have fun. 

Of course, these webs aren't sticky, so I used a bit of watered down Mod Podge, with a quick spray of isopropanol first. Too much of this can spoil the delicate web effect, and I wonder if just a spray of matt varnish would have done the job.  Once the sealing mix was drying, I added a few more bits of the material to bulk out the webs.

Finishing Off and Details 

Then it was just a case of adding basing materials, bearing in mind that I wanted them to look like dead or dying trees, and anyway, there's not usually a lot of vegetation at the base of a tree, the tree out competes it for light, water and nutrients.

I gave the bases a coat of coarse sand, but this didn't really look right for woods, it was too bare and needed more texture. This is where the contents of the tea bags comes in, broken up a bit, they look suitably like branches and twigs.

Then I added a few bits of decoration; some skulls and a skeletal torso from Mantic Games' Undead sprue, and some 'spider eggs'. 

These are pellets of 'Pearlite' (a product sold to bulk out soil and improve drainage for houseplants) though small polystyrene balls would work just as well or better. I mixed them into some PVA glue and then just dolloped it on where it looked good. Once dry, a bit more of the webbing to 'nest' them finished the job.

So there they are. Five web entangled spider nest trees.

I'm really pleased with how well these went together, and the materials were pretty easy to source, especially if you use polystyrene balls rather than vermiculite. 

A Recruit faces off against a Giant Spider near it's webbed tree, unaware that another Spider lurks behind him

The Wish trees are decent enough if re-leafed. In fact, I'd suggest that they are a good source of tree armatures for a very reasonable price, if you're happy to buy from Wish. I've got some more in the process of having better foliage added to give me some better trees, which I really must get around to finishing.

Note that I started these quite a while ago, but they remained unfinished as I wasn't quite happy with the bases. I wanted to do a bit of scenery as part of Dave Stone's Paint What You got Challenge , so quickly finished off the bases and here they are.