Into the Woods - part 1 - bases

So, as mentioned previously, I have some woods to knock together for our Age of Arthur day, and probably future use in other systems and eras.

One of my (many) pet peeves is the small trees in a lot of wargames scenery. The tree opposite our house is of the order of 60' tall - in 15mm that's about 6", and in 28mm it's nearer a foot. While the latter is probably a bit much for a typical wargames table, 6" high trees aren't that hard to come by.

I went for the Woodland Scenics tree armatures and a whole bunch of clump foliage, of which more later. But first, the base for the wood - like the stone circle, it's 60thou plasticard, cut to a suitably irregular shape with a slightly bevelled edge. The trees are based on readily available copper-plated 25.7mm, 2mm thick metal discs (post-1992, and only 2p each!) which serve two purposes:

1. they weight the bottom of the tree to stop it falling over quite so easily
2. they just happen to be magnetic

The plan was always to make the trees removable. The ingredients for this are some self-adhesive 0.5mm magnetic sheet, and a handy stash of 26mm inside diameter 2mm rubber washers off eBay: stick the magnet to the plasticard, superglue the washer to the magnet. It's not perfect, in that the pull isn't that strong, but it's enough to hold the tree in place against an accidental knock.

The first one I've done is on a roughly A4 piece of plasticard. The other ingredient is a small cutout area into which I can place a small feature - the one I've built so far is just a piece of old GW Lord of the Rings ruin, suitable for a Dark Ages setting, but I'll also build a 15mm bunker or pillbox to fit in the same spot (either that, or see if one of Battlefront's will fit!)

Next stage is to apply some filler (in this case Woodlands Scenics Foam Putty, since it's what I had around) to smooth out the edges of the washers and magnetic sheet. I'm still experimenting with this - depending on how well it sticks, I might switch to something else.

That's it for this time: next up, undercoat and flocking.