Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Fallen Alien Trees Cholla Wood Jungle Terrain

   In cleaning part of the warroom a couple weeks ago I came across a bag of five cholla wood pieces that I had bought at a local discount store a while back.  I finally decided it was time to do something with them, and set about constructing some fallen alien tree terrain pieces.  Cholla wood is normally sold in either pet shops or craft/decorating shops. There is also a ton of reasonably priced lots of it on ebay.
(Shown with 25mm Void 1.1 Viridian figures.)
The construction of these pieces was relatively straight forward.   First I took some pliers and tried to rough up the ends of the segments a little, by snapping bits off, as they all looked too clean cut. Then I glued the segments onto left over CD's
  When the glue was dry, I build up some spackle along the length of the"logs" to make it look like they were resting on the ground. I also pushed into the spackle as it was drying some small rocks and some of the small pieces of cholla I had snapped off in roughing up the edges.
When the spackle had dried, I took the pieces and sprayed them with a dark brown spray paint. I did this when I was rushed, and if I was to do it again, I would take more care to hit the insides of the "logs" with the spray paint. As it was i ended up having to paint a lot of the wood's interiors by hand
After the spray coat dried, it was then just a matter of drybrushing successively lighter coats of browns and tans onto the surface.  And when the paint was dry I then glued on assorted plastic vegetation and then flocked the bases.   I'm very pleased with how these turned out. They will make a great addition to my Sci-Fi and VSF jungle terrain. I'm also considering getting some more cholla wood to make the same kind of terrain pieces, but in a more sandy and rocky desert setting. Like ancient fallen trees in an alien desert.

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