Gnarly, Wildwood, and Skull Trees

Suddenly I stop, but I know it's too late... I'm lost in a forest, all alone — "A Forest", The Cure, 1980.

Look, if I can get Cure lyrics into a post then I'll get Cure lyrics into a post.

Anyway, along with a bunch of Calden Keep figures and some modelling tools, Alicia also gave me a $50 Etsy gift card for Christmas (along with a pair of slippers just to hammer home my age). I immediately jumped online and chucked these trees in my cart, as I really liked them and had wanted to buy them for ages. Because I'd added them to my favourites list, the seller gave me a code for 20% off so they came in at $45 for 11 32mm trees, although in this case 32mm means four or five inches tall. Four dollars each is a pretty good price for terrain bits this size.

The set consists of five plain trees, three with skulls around their bases, two with faces in their trunks, and one with a face and skulls. Because they're 32mm prints the skulls are pretty big, and I decided early on to cover the skulls and faces with flock.

I really had no idea how to paint them, but luckily I found really useful tutorials on Tabletop WitchCraft and Devs & Dice on how to make and paint trees, so I used techniques from both videos. I didn't bother putting foliage on the branches as frankly it sounds like a recipe for disaster. However, as one of the trees didn't get painted I might give foliage a go on that one.

So, here we go...

The trees all spent a night in the garage after being spray-primed black. The prints had no lines or nubs on them and are really well printed models. Before starting I moved a ton of stuff to the kitchen table as there's a lot more room than my painting desk and it has better access to the Keurig. Above are the craft paints I'll be using, starting with Burnt Umber on the left and moving through the lighter shades.

The first thing I did was mix black with burnt umber and slap it all over each tree. I didn't want the shadows to be pure black, and I didn't want them too be too brown, so I thought this shade would work well as a basecoat for all the other colours.

Next up was an overbrushing with Burnt Umber to get the brown tones on the trees. It was very easy to apply despite being 50-cent craft paint, and after two coats they looked great.

Each tree then got a lighter overbrushing with Nutmeg, which has a really nice reddish shade to it and boosted the depth of colour really well.

Drybrushing time! I kicked off with a fairly strong drybrush of Khaki, and immediately had doubts about how light it was. But I did the other nine trees the same way and was only slightly worried that I'd buggered them up.

After a thorough once-over with some homemade black/brown wash they looked darker and better, and I felt better about their look. They got a second, thinner coat of wash just to tone them down a bit.

Happy with the trees, I made a start on their bases by plastering them with English Ivy, which is a dark green and covered the basecoat really well. As you can tell from the wet patches in the photo, I basically slapped it on in varying depths to avoid having a uniform look to each one.

Time to crack out the flock! Well, first I put all the paints away as I was getting The Look from Alicia thanks to the crap cluttering up the kitchen table. I used a lot of matte Mod Podge on the bases and then piled on the flock, which is a mix of Green Blend, Earth Blend and Burnt Grass. I made sure to get it up the tree trunks to give the impression of age and growth.

After a light coating of Green Blend, I used more Mod Podge to add some dark green clumps and then blasted it with a mix of PVA and water to seal it all. After leaving the trees overnight to dry, I used superglue to stick on some stones from the driveway. 

You can see the tree on the back right has skulls and a face on it, so I used a ton of clumps to cover them up. 

OK, so this is the point where I had a couple of days away from finishing the trees and totally forgot to take WIP photos when I got back to them. Oops. So the next pics are of the completed models.

I dug out some printed mushrooms I picked up from Etsy and brought even more stuff to the kitchen table to paint them. I was going to go with a pretty standard red look, but I decided orange was a more fantasy-type colour and would add a much brighter element to the trees. Each mushroom cap was given a coat of Heavy Orange before being daubed with Casandora Yellow wash to deepen the orange shade, like I did for one of my Chaos Renegades' armour trim. I applied a second coat of wash over parts of the caps to vary the orange tone, and then painted the stalks White and added White dots to the caps.

After two coats of matte varnish, I superglued the mushrooms in place on the trees. Some of the 'shrooms come on tiny rock-like bases, so I just cut them off so I could stick them wherever I thought they'd look best.

The stones got a wash with some Biel-Tan Green and Athonian Camoshade just to give them that mossy look. Finally, I dug out some tufts and superglued them on. They were a bit of a pain to attach; their bases aren't as flexible as, say, Army Painter tufts, so it was a lot harder to make them conform to the contours of the bases. 

Actually, that wasn't the final thing. I thought the green flock looked too uniform, so I got some of my light green stuff and added patches of it to the bases just to vary the colours. It also got a good soaking in thinned PVA, and once that dried I considered them finished. Yay!

I'm really happy with them and think they look great. I did mull adding some flowers to the bases, but thought the mushrooms provided enough colour and didn't need any more. The unpainted tree will be done in a different way at some point just to try doing foliage, and for all you Muppet fans out there the next mission is coming soon!