A Century of Conifers

This month I decided I needed more trees, particularly conifers, and I thought I could make them.  After watching a couple of videos on how to construct pine trees suitable for model railways in the Rockies, I had a go.  My aim was to make trees that would suit 15mm scale down to 6mm.

Württembergers (15mm Warrior) emerge from the forest

This required a simple plan of taking pieces of kitchen scourer (from Poundland) and then impaling them onto cocktail sticks.  The original intent was to follow the videos and tear the scourers into sections, but this ended up being too much effort.

Basic ingredients

I had also intially tried to push the sections of scourer directly onto the sticks but quickly realised I'd need to make a hole in them, otherwise they wouldn't go on, hence the spike (from a biology dissecting kit).

T-55 (6mm Heroics and Ros) in the woods

Before adding each section of scourer I dipped the end of the cocktail stick into some thick PVA (wood) glue so that everything was secure.

Coniferous cubism

Tearing the scourers into sections proved to be tedious and time consuming, so for most of the trees I just cut squarish sections of scourer instead and slotted those on, trimming them into shape later.

A tin of unpainted trees

Finishing the trees required giving them a generous wash of dark brown arylic then spraying them dark green (Army Painter Angel Green).  Minimal highlighting was added using the scrapings from various pots of green paint I had on my workbench.

Brown before green

Basing involved cutting the cocktail sticks to shorten the tree trunks, then using my new hot glue gun to fix them to 30mm diameter mdf (from Warbases).  These were finished with my usual coarse shelly sand that was then given a wash of dark brown acylic paint (no dry-brushing requried).

A century of conifers

Overall I made exactly 100 of these, hence the reference to 'century', which also hints at how long it felt sometimes it was taking me to make them all.