How Not To Make: Bushes

Well, after the success of last week’s project I decided it was time to try out a new theory I concocted.

One thing my war-games terrain is missing, apart from hills, buildings, rivers, lakes, mountains, roads … … … is hedges. I have 2. they cost me £2.50 each and they look rubbish. Unfortunately this is true of all hedges, everywhere. Even if they did look good they would be far too expensive, so I cane up with a theory for making realistic looking hedges.

However, as I said last week I still don't have any PVA so I thought I’d just make some bushes to test out the technique before building a full blown hedgerow. Here’s what I did.

I used the offcut from last weeks scenery project to make a small base, poured a swirl of superglue and then remembered to take a pic…

 

I added rocks… Then I built an armature for the hedge from wire.

I should do this for a living, no? I covered it roughly with putty to pad it out a little and hold all the bits in place.

Not my best effort. I could have spent more time on it and let it dry but you wont see most of it and I can always clean it up with paint. Deciding it would be faster to add the other bushes from premade twigs I used some spare bits from the dryads I made during the summer and glued them in place.

Like so… Then I took some foam. I get mine from all the Otherworld packaging I have lying around. Every model, even just a single rat comes packed in two feet of foam, I think I have enough to build a small forest. I pulled it to bits and started gluing them to the branches of the bushes.

 

I did that for a bit… until it looked like this…

I only used a piece of foam about 1” x 1/2” x 1/2” but I still had plenty left when I was happy with the bushes so I stuffed the rest into the gaps in the stones…

And left to dry over night.

Next time I’ll paint the rocks and branches and then start to flock the whole thing. Remember this is an experiment, it could still go horribly wrong!