[sg, ds] modeling - tree bases

Hi,

With the recent discussions on tree bases, I thought I'd toss in this idea.

I did up "forest bases" by purchasing a pile of roughly 9"x12" sheets of dark
green felt from a local craft store. These were really inexpensive (maybe
$0.25 each). I cut them into a variety of curved (kidney
bean-ish)
shapes. Then I stuck flock down all over them, leaving a thin border of
the dark green felt showing (appx 1/4").  The flock colour was as close
as I could find to the ground mat I use (GeoHex standard green ground mat).

Take a look at:

http://www.stargrunt.ca/acj/felt_mat_1.htm

for a few example pics I put up.

The trees I use are similar to the type sold by Games Workshop and a number
of railroad terrain companies.  These are the wire-stiffened trees with
pre-applied folliage (similar to a brush bristles, covered with flock).
I've used Woodland Scenic trees, where you have to stick on the folliage
yourself, but these are a pain. There are some good tricks for getting them to
stay assembled (like spraying them with hairspray), but they still take lots
of time to assemble. They make great burned out forest though. Anyway, I
purchased several bags of the large round flat plastic bases that GW sells,
and stuck one tree to a base. The bases were then painted and flocked with the
same flock as the felt.

Now, I have a big pile of tree areas, and I put 2 or 3 trees onto each one
during a game. The edge of the tree base is the edge of the forest. Not having
the trees actually attached means I can move them out of the way if someone
wants to put figures there, and packing them is really simple. The felt goes
in a bag, the trees get stuffed in a different bag, and the whole set goes in
a box.

The nice thing about using flocked felt like this is that you can bend it over
terrain features like hills, if you want. Certainly I've played on uneven
tables in the past (I'm sure eveyone has at one time or another) and having
"flexible" features like this makes things a bit easier.

I did the same thing for a river, using blue felt. Worked quite well, though
the river itself is a wee bit on the blue side...

Anyway, method has a couple of advantages over the
stick-trees-to-a-board
method (which I've also used in the past): it is fast and it is inexpensive.

Also, setup and take down are quick, and both the trees on a single base and
the felt mats are quite durable and stand up well to the trials wargaming
terrain has to endure. Oh, and they're relatively thin, which keeps things
from getting to lumpy on the table. And they don't hurt figs that fall over.

G'day,

> I did up "forest bases" by purchasing a pile of roughly

We do the same thing and it works a charm! Especially for defining forest
edges etc. We found its doubly good as you can just whack down more trees or
heaps of lichen under the trees to show that the forest is denser. In addition
if you have different sized trees you can have DS forests at no extra cost;)

Cheers

Good points all, but this would work real well
in covering up those blasted edges/seems..)

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