Quick Hobby Project - 28mm Fir Trees

I was scrounging around some old boxes yesterday and found an open bag with a few fir trees in it. I recalled that when I was making up trees for our 15mm Napoleon's Battle games and I deemed around a dozen trees as being too "big" for use with 15mm miniatures. However, instead of throwing them away, I packed them away in a box and then promptly forgot about them ... for over a decade!

I had sold off my NB figures several years ago and now almost exclusively paint/game with 28mm figures. So when I came across the forgotten trees I realized I now have a reason to get them on the gaming table. So taking a break from painting up some Dutch infantry for Sharp's Practice and a Dark Elf Blood Bowl team, I decided on a quick one day hobby project to base up the trees.

The trees are wire stemmed so before use I would need to make some kind of base for them. I had thirteen trees (with one of them being a very small one that I must have missed those years ago) and at first was going to base them individually, but upon reflection decided to do a mix of one's and two's per base.

I cut various shapes from card stock but realized that the card stock was to thin glue the trees to. In addition the stem of the tree was to short to twist into a flat shape to glue to the base. So I cut up thirteen squares of foam board to thicken up the location where each trees would "planted". Needless to say, the foamcard kind of stood out, so I puttied up the base to hide them.

I then painted the base a reddish brown highlighted with a tan, glued on some dirt/rocks, as well as some flocking. The base was looking a little bare, so I added some clump foliage to "raise" the height of the flocking. I then drilled a small hole into the foam board and superglued in the tree ... for eight bases of "large" fir trees for use with my 28mm Chain of Command, Sharp's Practice, SAGA figures or even a Frostgrave games.