Terrain from spare parts: Building a dead tree

Today I want to continue with my articles about how you can make terrain out of chunk or spare parts. This time I will show you, how you can make a dead tree (the one you can see on the left side) completely from chunk.

What you will need for this:
- Paper towel
- A twig or dried flower stem
- Something for a base (e.g. a washer)
- Glue
- Sand/Earth
- Static grass/flock (completely optional)

Twigs

Paper towel

Step 1

Tear the paper towel apart into different sizes and make it wet (not soaking wet but thus that it can be easily twirled). Roll the paper towel strips between your fingers or on your cutting mat, so that you get "worms" of different length and thickness. If you plan to do more than one tree, start mass production :)

You can now wait until the paper strips are dry, but I didn't wait so long, because it is easier to work with them if the are still a bit damp.

If you have enough of the strips together, align them on your base as if the are bigger roots of a tree which comes out of the ground.

Then glue the stuff thoroughly with PVA glue to the base and also cover the strips, so that they harden out in the end. But don't slop the base with the glue, otherwise you will loose the structure (height) of the "roots" in the end. Remember we will sand the base if everything is finished.

Step 2

Search yourself a fitting twig or flower stem. It should fit somehow to the rest of your trees/terrain. I took a dead branch of one of our plants on the balcony because it already hat some twigs and a nice shape.

Glue it on the roots you created in step 1. If you really want to strengthen the bond between base and twig, you could push a nail through the base and into the stem. I didn't do that, being optimistic that it will be stable enough with just glue.

To strengthen our complete construction we now sand the base and wait until everything is completely dry.

Step 3

This will be our last step. We now pimp everything by coloring it. For it was just base-coating the sand in my red-brown acrylic paint. After that was dry, I drybrushed the base until I was satisfied with the color. Then I washed the twig in different browns, greens and purples to shade it down quite a bit.

After I finished the painting I applied a bit of static grass to tone it even more into my gaming plate.

I had so much fun, that I did some variations of this stuff, by using bark, broken twigs and even real stones. They are not yet finished but I liked to play around a bit.


That's it!
Hope you enjoyed this "Terrain from garbage" tutorial as much as I did while building/writing it. If I can improve something or if you want to see something else or if you want to tell me how awesome I am (SCNR) please leave a comment. Comments really help us Bloggers staying motivated.


So long,
Paradox0n