Since the last post, I've painted coat after coat after coat of green paint over the foam foliages, trying to eradicate the shiny spots left by the bare plastic. I think I've pretty much gotten rid of those, except for perhaps one or two here and there, but I soon tired of playing whack-a-mole with them and called that part good. The color was okay, a nice deep green, by themselves in that color, they would have looked good enough, but I wanted something more, some highlighting. So I went to work, dampbrushing a shade of light green all over each of the foliages... I had also made two more of those, bringing the total to sixteen, more than enough I think.
They were actually starting to look pretty good.
The next step was to model the trunks. These were plain wooden dowels, smooth, round, not at all like actual tree trunks. To fix that I used some indoor wood putty, I could have used the green or white hobby putty too. I had gotten a lot of green paint on the trunks which I had to scrape off, in addition to roughing up the smooth wood so that the wood filler would stick better. Then I shot the putty in lines up and down the trunks, not too much of it, just enough to work around then rough up, rubbing it, picking at it, scraping gently with a serrated knife, working bits of putty that had fallen off back in until I was satisfied that they looked kind of sort of like miniature tree trunks.
I waited for the wood filler to dry, I didn't have long to wait as it was quick drying filler, so it was soon time to paint the trunks.
When people paint trees, they paint the trunks brown, and companies that make models of trees mold the trunks in brown plastic, but when you look at trees, they're not really all that brown, there's a lot of grey in the brown, just a little brown, and a lot of grey, and some green where moss collects. So first I painted the trunks in raw umber, a dark brown without the color being like chocolate. Yes, brown, but I only started with brown.
Next I added some medium/light grey to the brown, a little black, a little more brown, a little more medium/light grey until I found what I thought would look good, and started painting over the brown, dampbrushing it, I didn't want to paint the trunks entirely in that color, I still wanted to keep a lot of the brown, but wanted to get a rough texture, the look of bark, and so my grey/brown mix would do just that, give the trunk the look of rough bark.
The last big hurdle had been cleared, I painted and highlighted all sixteen trunks, which are all drying now. Next, I'll do some touching up where the putty and paint went into the boughs, and in the meantime, I'll need to figure out a way to really secure the trees to their stands, as well as to find or make things to further decorate the tree bases, undergrowth, fallen, dead trunks. Not to mention looking up my copy of the DBA rules to find out what the legal size of a forest stand should be. Lion Rampant doesn't have anything on that, but DBA is rather strict about such things.
So until next time... En Avant!!
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