Micro-forestation for Microarmour

The forest-base is shown here with some Heroics & Ros WWII British infantry and a GHQ A9 Cruiser tank.

 I have a couple of alders growing in the front of my section. They're not among my favourite trees, but they do have one use.

Making teensy-tiny forests to go along with teensy-tiny toy soldiers.

Alder cones

They produce small cones, and when they're seeding, these cones dry up and open out. They range in size from a couple of centimetres in length down to about 5 or 6mm, and they're conveniently bushy-looking for my wargames-scenery purposes. The picture to the right shows what they look like straight off the tree, still attached to their twig, but the cones will eventually drop off and lie all over the ground, a savagely spiky trap for the bare-footed.

I snipped some, of varying sizes, off their twigs and hot-glued them to a sort of kidney-shaped 0.5mm galvanized steel base. I sealed the lot with matte-black spray paint, added a bit of flock around the base, and loosely painted the cones in a couple of shades of yellowish-green.

The individual base shown above took me about half an hour from start to finish, but if you were production-lining them I suspect they would average out to more like ten minutes each.

My aim is to have a multitude of small forest modules that can be rearranged into as large or as small a forest as is required, rather than using larger, less flexible modules.