Expanding Rainforests

   Much as I am still whacking posts up, I'm still just catching up on units I painted in my recent splurge of painting time. This post is another of these - doing another chunk of jungle scenery in the hope of getting some games of 10th edition 40k over the summer.

   On the last post of the jungle scenery where I did 5 bases of trees and undergrowth, I mentioned that I had gone the whole hog and prepped all the big bases I had so that I only needed to hot glue the plant life onto them once I bought more trees. I picked up 5 more plastic bonsai trees from China in two different designs and sprayed the leaves a darker green, repainted the trucks where I'd gotten paint on them and spend an hour or so with a hot glue gun to do another 7 bases.

   I've played a couple of games with the full 11 finished bases of trees and while it is a pretty good start I think I need another batch to really finish it off* and make a dense board like I used to gawp over in the 3rd edition Catachan codex. I've now run out of the big trees again, so I'm tempted to order one or two more, but I do have more palm trees to use to bulk out a few more smaller bases.

*Although I have now filled up the box assigned to jungle scenery

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Rainforests - how hard can they be?

   It's been a while since I've started a post with a blurb about a new project, so because I can't seem to keep focused on anyone thing for too long, here we go with a brand new project;
   I have recently been travelling around the forests of Costa Rica and it's been hard not to come away so heavily inspired that I knew I needed to try building some. I've not tried to reinvent the wheel and have taken heavily from Sir Michael Awdry, so I won't go over how I made them in any more details than anywhere I have diviated from his method.

   First up, I thought I would go over my inspiration. Costa Rica turns out to have multiple different types of tropical forest*, including; Rainforests, Cloud Forests and Dry Tropical Forests, with variations in between. This has meant I have seen the classic palm tree style forests, forests that look like British forests except for the heat and forests that have plants that would be unbelivable if modelled in 28mm unless you were planning on using them exclusively for sci-fi games.

*Rainforests aren't the be all and end all that I assumed

  

 

 

   My dilemma then came when I tried to put what I had seen into practise, how do I get the sheer range of plants and thickness of the vegetation onto the gaming board and make it survive playing games with. Ideally, I want to have a mix of tree types (for my practise ones I was happy to just use palm trees) but I need to work out how to use other tree types without it looking like I have just put British trees in a rainforest board, but that is a problem for later.

   Ultimately, I am pretty pleased with the outcome of my morning's work, the bases need a certain something but that will come with time I think, although any suggestions will be gratefully accepted.

   As these were supposed to be a test bed for a number of thing, namely; how many more plants do I need to buy, does my idea actually work and can I make them thick enough, I limited myself to 3 bases of trees and a single bit of scatter terrain. In the future I would like to fill a 6/4 board as heavily as makes sense.

Spot the bird.

 



 

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