A thing a week 2021, week 27 (desert forest)

And now for something different. My current every-other-Saturday game is in a desert and I didn't feel like deciduous trees would cut it. Turns out, it's really hard to get models of date palms and other desert trees. What you can get is coconut palms and most people wouldn't know the difference. One of my players is from Guam and does know the difference. I've sworn him to secrecy so we should be fine.

These are literally the least expensive coconut palms I could find on Amazon. Notably, today, I've found some less expensive ones but I didn't find them when I ordered mine. They are not great props but they'll work and they were inexpensive so here we go. Step 1: scrape mold lines. They're made in very soft and cheap plastic as one might expect but that results in some pretty heinous mold lines. I didn't bother trying to deal with the mold lines on the leaves which come off in separate pieces but dealing with the trunks wasn't hard.

Step 2: base them. This was slightly harder than you might imagine. The larger trees are large enough to want to fall over pretty commonly. I weighted the larger 32mm bases with some steel nuts I had lying around which make them almost stable. The larger ones are still a mess. These were all hot glued down to a base and textured with Vallejo texture paste which is my current go-to. While I'd normally throw some grit down on the wet paste to give it some variety; these guys are terrain and don't really warrant such steps.

Step 4 is washing the trunks. The leaves pull off so this wasn't hard. Step 5 is painting the texture paste. I didn't bother priming because I didn't think it was necessary and still don't have the airbrush control to not get it all along the trunk. Step 6 is black rimming the base and that's what we see in the "glamour" shot. These do break one of my rules: avoid obscuring the battlefield, but they're thin enough that I'm not super worried about it. These work and I'm counting them as "buildings." Maybe I should rename the requirement as "terrain" or something. Next year I guess.

2021 finished buildingterrain counter: 5/5