Unable to find ready made trees whose cost fell inside my budget limitations, I decided to try and make my own. After a bit of research on the internet I have come up with two techniques that produce acceptable trees. By mixing up the techniques that you use in your tree construction, your gaming board will all of a sudden have some acceptable looking forests.

This article details the first tree making technique that I use.

First thing to do is to cut a number of bases out of the MDF. I used 5mm thick MDF and cut irregular shapes using a jigsaw.

Next, cut tree size pieces out of the branches you have collected. I found that the more stable trees, have at least 3 connection points between trunk and leaves. Try to vary the height of the trunks that you cut.

An advantage of using sticks as the trunks of our trees, is that most of the texture and features have already been provided for you... Not to mention that sticks are free!!

Now to the steel wool preparation. The first thing that you have to do is get rid of the soap that is in the steel wool.

Of course if you can get steel wool that doesn't have soap in it then that is a bonus. I brought the cheapest steel wool that I could find because I figured that the soap would not be as hard to get out due to the poorer quality of the steel wool. The quickest way to get rid of the soap is to soak the steel wool in boiling water for a while.

Once the steel wool is dry (I used the oven to dry my steel wool), pull it apart to resemble a vague tree shape. The beauty of using steel wool is that if your shaping doesn't work out the first time, just scrunch the whole lot up and start again. Try to keep the steel wool the thickest in the center of the tree to get some depth to our foliage.

This bit is pretty easy. Simply hot glue the steel wool foliage to the trunk. Do a dry run first to get the tree looking how you want it, because the hot glue dries very quickly and you don't want to end up with a hot glue tree after multiple goes. Once the hot glue is dry, do any final tweaking of your tree's foliage before moving on. If you notice any stray bits of steel wool sticky up at funny angles, give your tree it a quick hair cut with some scissors.

Now the fun bit!! Spray the whole tree Chaos Black and let it dry. Make sure you get good coverage on the steel wool, because we don't want shiny bits in our trees at the end of the day.

Once the paint is dry, spray the steel wool with contact adhesive. Try not to get too much contact adhesive on the trunk as the flock will stick to it. A little bit won't hurt and merely add's some texture to the trunk. Let the spray adhesive go off for a awhile and then flock the tree. I got my kids to help with this bit. My advise to you is even if you don't have your kids helping you, do this bit outside or you will get flock everywhere!

I made a two-tone flock by combining a dark green and a light green flock. I feel this is more effective then a single colour, but, the choice is yours.

In my first attempt at making a base for these trees, I used air hardening modeling clay. The end effect was quite good, but, I needed something faster. I ended up using a MDF base and the following technique.

Take your previously prepared MDF bases. I find these bases look best when the edges are cut at a bit of an angle. I gave the base a quick sand with a medium grade sandpaper to get rid of all the sharp edges. Next, drill a hole in the MDF base where you want the tree to go. Ensure that this hole is just a bit bigger then the trunk of the tree. Using hot glue, glue the tree to the base. Stick a bit of paper under the base to make sure that the hot glue doesn't stick the base to whatever surface you are working on.

Now all that remains to be done is to make the base match your other scenery pieces.

The technique I use is as follows. I put a layer of Rapid Set Spak filler on the base, to get rid of the flatness of the MDF. Before this dries I press modeling gravel into the surface and sprinkle sand all over.

This is the easy bit. I base coat the tree and the base with Scorched Brown. The Scorched Brown gives the tree and any rocky areas a warmth, that a Chaos Black base coat doesn't.

The tree is then drybrushed with one of two colour combinations. The first combination is Bestial Brown followed by Snakebite Leather, with the second combination being Fortress Grey followed by Bleached Bone. If you look closely at the bark of trees in exposed conditions their bark is generally a greyish sort of colour as opposed to trees in that are in a heavily wooded area, whose bark is a more brown colour. Please note that this generalization does not take into account tree species.

The base is drybrushed with Bubonic Brown and Bleached Bone for the dirt areas. Any rocky areas are drybrushed Codex Grey, Fortress Grey finished up with a very light drybrush of Skull White. Lastly give the whole thing a couple good sprays of varnish. This helps to keep the flock on the tree as well as protect it against the rigors of table top war gaming.

There you have it! This method of making trees is certainly cheap (I have spent approx. $18AUD on materials and have made 24 trees so far) and they look great when grouped together.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article and that I have inspired you to get stuck into your own tree production. If you have any ideas for improvements, or techniques of your own, I would be very interested in hearing them.