Making Mirkwood Trees for your tabletop games

I decided a while back that what I desperately needed for my game board is enough trees to make a forest. This was a silly thought as I haven't played a tabletop game in months. Nevertheless I decided to embark on this project, and so watched a whole bunch of YouTube videos, and dug through my terrain making books, and settled on making them with aluminum foil. This decision was based in part on the fact that it was a material I had plenty of, was cheap, and easy to work with. 

Then I needed to figure out how many trees to make. I set up my playing space and pulled out my 2" bases. It took about 18 to convincingly fill a 3*3 play area. 

The final decision at this point was to decide how tall I wanted the trees. Using Sir Forscale, I settled on a 4 to 6 inch range to make the trees feel big enough, but not so large that they would totally dominate the board even if there were just a few. 

 

Please note there is nothing in this tutorial that can't be found elsewhere, but this has the advantage of not being a video!

It was time to start making the trees. I pulled out sheets of foil and started wrapping. 

 

I started with about a 14-16 inch long piece of foil, which I then folded...

  

 

And started wrapping. Why 14-16 inches? Because as I twist the foil, it gets smaller, so that by the time I'm done the tree fits in the 4-6 inch total height that I was looking for.

 

 

Then I'd take another sheet and wrap it around the first to bulk up the trunk, and start to make the branches (not pictured). I then used hot glue to stick it to a 2" base. Sometimes I'd stick the second sheet of foil in the folds of the main trunk before I did the wrapping. Honestly, there was a lot of experimentation in making these, which resulted in a lot of different tree shapes. 

The nice thing about working with foil like this, is that if a spot needed bulking out, or filled in, or whatever, it was easy enough to take an extra bit of foil and wrap, stuff, and glue it where it needed to go.

 

 

I then took a sheet of foil and made one long roll, and cut it into small pieces to serve as roots, and glued them to the trees and bases.  Some roots were small, but I made some really twisty and large. After that, I used the glue gun to put a layer of hot glue all over the trees, both to seal the foil and to make some texture. I missed some spots, and others ended up smoother than I'd have liked, but the variety makes for a more interesting, and even more realistic set of trees. 

 

 

Then it was time to paint. I mixed black craft paint with Mod Podge and gave every tree a thick coat. Then I went back and gave them a second coat, cause some spots didn't cover the first time. 

 

 

Then I realized I forgot to texture the bases. So I did that, using a mix of sand and gravel. Then painted the bases with the same mod podge and paint mix. If I am ever to add more trees to my forest, or make another one, I'll remember to add the ground cover before I prime them.

 

 

Then it was time to add some real color. I started with a heavy brush of craft smart (Michaels brand) chocolate brown, followed by a nutmeg brown, and then a dry brush of antique white.  

 

 

You'll note I didn't make any smaller branches. My initial plan was to add foliage to these trees, so I only needed the main branches to hold it. You'd never see the smaller ones. 

 

But once I was done, I started to think that they look good like this. And maybe they'd work better as dead spooky mirkwood style trees. While I was still deciding on the foliage, I used some green and purple paints to splotch on some color. and gave the trees another final dry brush of the antique white. The green and purple are only a little noticeable if you're really looking for it, but it adds some more visual depth to the trees that made the effort worth it.

 

You have to admit this looks pretty good. The bark texture is way overstated and looks delightfully diseased. This is not a healthy forest by any stretch of the imagination.

The trees are wonderfully flexible. I can dump the lot of the from the table to the floor and they're going to bounce. My toddler can manhandle them, and they survive just fine. The biggest danger is them popping off the bases, but you have to work really hard to make that happen. 

I do think I'll do 1 or 2 more "character" type trees. I'm especially thinking about one tree growing over a dungeon entrance, maybe a gulthias tree? And the other I'm thinking off is more of an evil grandmother willow type tree with a face. We'll see if and when I get around to ever making those.