Tutorial: Plants & Vegetation
Plants are a perfect way to make bases interesting because they're A) useful across many terrain types, B) scalable to different sizes, and C) varied enough that we can use just a just a little or a lot.
For the purposes of this tutorial, we'll be doing all of this with cheap and easy materials.
We'll start with the basics such as static grass, leaf clutter and field grass, move on to more complicated plant life such as elephant grass, cattails, bamboo, and lilypads, and so forth.
Static Grass
Static grass is one of the easiest things to add to a base, and the process is very simple. Put a small dab of glue on the base and affix a clump of loose static grass or a tuft.
Put a dab of superglue on the base and affix your tuft.
For loose static grass, turn the miniature upside down, tap the side of its base to knock off the excess static grass, then gently blow on the base to make the strands stand up.
You don't need to do this for tufts. Just peel and stick and done.
Leaf Clutter
Just about any time of year, you can find all sorts of clutter mixed in with the grass. Leaves, small branches, and natural detritus litter the ground. It's very easy to represent this at miniature scale.
The easiest material to use is Hudson & Allen Studio ground foliage. A bag will last ages.
If you can't find this product, raid the kitchen spice rack. Basil and thyme make excellent ground scatter, and cutting open a tea bag will give you a pile of wonderfully convincing black earth or mulch.
If you use spices, make sure to give them a good clear coat.
Whatever material you use, there's two basic methods for applying it: individual pieces added one at a time, or blanketing the base. Personally I'm very fond of individually placed pieces.
In both cases, use a tiny drop of white PVA glue. Superglue doesn't have the best bond and can whiten on the base, while PVA glue will dry clear.
Put a drop of glue on a scrap piece of plastic or cardboard and use a toothpick to apply small dots of glue on the base. With tweezers, apply pieces one at a time and gently push down. It's not nearly as time consuming or fiddly as you might expect.
The blanket method is just as it sounds -- use an old brush to paint the glue on the base and cover it in your preferred clutter.
Field Grass
Let's talk about Woodland Scenics Field Grass.
This is simultaneously useful and frustrating stuff. Packaged loose in a plastic bag, it consists of individual strands of dyed natural hair and a figure-it-out-yourself method of attaching it! Hopefully this tutorial will help.
For terrain made of foam, use the end of a toothpick and push a hole into the area you want the field grass. Remove a pinch from the package and lay the middle of the strands across this dent. Then use a pair of tweezers to push the strands into the foam, and glue them into place.
The other method is to prepare the strands for insertion into a base, and you'll have to do it this way to use it on plastic miniature bases.
First, use a scrap piece of plastic and put a liberal amount of superglue on it. Take a pinch of the field grass and roll the center between your fingers, twisting if necessary.
While still holding the strands together, slide your fingers apart and dip the center of the strands into the glue, saturate it, and pull it out. Wait until the strands no longer try to pull apart, then set this aside to dry.
After it's fully dried, snip it in two with scissors and you'll have two clumps of grass ready to be inserted into a pre-drilled hole.
Paper Plants
One of the most readily available materials useful for making foliage is often overlooked: paper.
It's cheap, easy to work with, and thin.
The only disadvantage is its fraility, though this can be tempered with a little superglue or white glue.
In this section of the tutorial, we're going to lay down some basic techniques that will let us do some pretty fun types of foliage.
Grab some paper and follow along, just make sure it doesn't have lines (such as notebook paper). Avoid recycled paper as it shreds too easily when painted.
The first step is to paint the paper like plant matter! Both sides will need to be painted, though one side can just be done in basic tones. For grasses, streak the paint from darker green to pale, keeping all strokes in the same direction.
For more complicated shapes like oversized leaves, it might be helpful to draw an outline in pencil and give it a bit more finesse.
Start with a sharp hobby knife to slice the paper into grass-sized strips, careful to avoid cutting all the way through. This gives you a place to hold the paper steady to avoid fraying and tearing. Once you've done the entire painted area this way, you can snip the individual blades free.
The edges will show some of the paper's original colour after being cut. You might be tempted to fix this now with a little paint, but it's better to wait until the end to do that.
To give the grass blades a natural curl, moisten it slightly and wrap it around a pencil o ra brush. Go through the whole pile doing this, giving some more extreme curls than others, then let them dry fully before moving onto the next part.
We'll use a small section of 0.20mm brass rod as a stem. Pick one of your grass blades, push the wider end against the rod, and give it a pinch to wrap the very bottom around the rod. A little superglue will hold it in place. Set aside and work through the whole pile, giving each blade it's on individual stem.
After this step is dry, now you can paint the edges and fix any glue marks.
Each blade of grass is ready to be pinned into a base. It's an ideal solution for creating sturdy cattails and swamp grass, without the fragility of resin 3D prints.
Cattails (aka Bullrushes)
Primarily cattails can be created with a cluster of elephant grass and one or two brass rods with rounded tubes on the end.
All we really need to focus on are the cattail heads. The best looking option is using a little Green Stuff or Apoxie Sculpt over the head of a pin.
You can also easily make the head by wrapping some masking tape around one end of a pin.
Finally we could dip the end of a rod or pin into glue and then into sand to create a cattail that's about to release seeds.
Placing these into the middle of some elephant grass results in a surprisingly convincing effect.
Experiment with other methods of creating the cattail heads: use plastic putty, or cut down toothpicks, or leftover plastic sprue.
Add a little bit of UV resin for swamp water, and you've got an effect that will make your minis stand out agains the opposition.
Bamboo
One distinctive plant not often used on miniature bases is bamboo.
To build our bamboo, we need to understand the structure. The stems are jointed, and each division is called a node. These nodes are what gives bamboo its unique look, so our first step is to recreate those.
Stick a length of 0.032 brass rod into a piece of cork or foam, then pinch off a tiny amount of Green Stuff and apply it to the top. Smooth it down, into an inverted cone. This will be the top of our bamboo and the end of the upper most node.
Use a similar size blob of Green Stuff and wrap it around the rod about 4mm to 7mm below our first. For this one, we'll smooth both the top and bottom. Keep the middle thicker.
Use a sculpting tool or toothpick and press a notch in the thick middle part. At this point you'll see that it's beginning to really look like a stem of bamboo!
Repeat the process as necessary and set it aside to cure.
Once the Green Stuff is cured, prime and paint like any other miniature element.
As for what colours, bamboo comes in a variety. The most common colour folks associate with bamboo is yellow or tan, but the choices are wide ranging. Bright hardy greens, pale greens, or fades between tan and green are all possibilities.
I've also read that blacks and dark browns can be seen in nature, but that might look out of place since it runs counter to expectations.
For a final touch, add small football-shaped leaves to the bamboo stems, using the same techniques as you would for elephant grass.
However I'd recommend only doing this for display pieces, as the leaves can easily fall off if this is on a gaming miniature.
Lily Pads
Thematically it makes sense to move from cattails and bamboo to that other popular marsh plant, lilypads.
Paper lilypads would be quite easy -- all we'd need is paper, a hole punch, and a hobby knife to nick a small triangle out of each. But let's make some with thickness.
Start with a small blob of Green Stuff and roll it into a ball.
Using the side of a hobby knife or the flat of a sculpting tool, flatten the ball into a disk.
To give the lilypad it's distinctive and recognizable look, cut a small triangle from one side of the disk.
You can also take this opportunity to add a radial pattern extending from the center of the lilypad.
Another option would be to take a round tool, or the end of a brush handle, and make the center of the lilypad dimpled.
It only takes a small amount to make a single lilypad, so it's a great use of Green Stuff that's leftover from other sculpting projects.
Make an entire pond of the things and set them aside to cure, then prime and paint them a suitable shade of green.
I find it easier to lay them out in a row on a piece of masking tape, paint and clear coat them, and then pull them off as I need them.
As for attaching them to your base, the process is simple: just a dab of super glue and your job is done, regardless if the faux water is painted on, gloss coated, or Envirotex Lite.
"But wait," I hear you cry. "Don't some lilypads bloom? Yours are naked!" And indeed, sir or madam, you would be correct! This coincidently brings us to the next section of this tutorial...
Flowering Plants
Flowers are a bit more advanced, but they're only a step or two more complicated than our elephant grass and leaves. The difficulty comes about from scaling down the work which makes cutting, painting, and gluing tricky. Good tweezers and magnifying lenses are a necessity.
Start by drawing some fattened plus sign on a piece of paper, cut them out carefully with a hobby knife, and then poke a hole right in the center of each piece with a needle or other sharp point.
Use the hole we poked into the flower petals to slide them on a length of 0.020 brass rod, then glue it in place. A tiny tiny dab is all you need -- you may want to put a drop of superglue on a scrap piece of plastic, then use a toothpick to transfer it to the flower.
Once this is dry, prime and paint. As I said, the hardest part about this is the size of the pieces -- the process itself is quite straightforward.
It's not a good idea to cut out individual leaves at this scale as they'd be extremely difficult to attach and very fragile. Instead, cut out a shape like a "bow tie," pierce the center, and slide onto the rod.
Even using parchment, plants made using paper are going to be more fragile than their etched brass counterparts. You can combat this by ensuring all paper components have been hardened with a few drops of superglue (before priming and painting, obviously!). Careful placement on the base will also help. Try to avoid the edges and place your paper plants near the center.
Leafy Plants
Leafy plants mirror the construction techniques of the previous sections. Much of the process is exactly the same -- draw a shape on parchment, paint it, cut it out and glue to rod or some other structure.
It's always good to reference real plants to make the best looking leaves. And make more than you think you need: it's easy to make a mistake and ruin a leaf, and it's easy to underestimate how many you need for realistic coverage.
For some plants, it may be fine to pin the individual leaves and glue them to the base in a cluster, but most plants will need a little more effort. I made a small trunk by twisting wire together, gluing it, and dipping the main portion in sand. The ends of the wire were left exposed, positioned appropriately, and leaves glued to them. I left the example plant in the photo is purposely thin so that the structure is easy to understand; when making your own plant you'd want enough leaves to give good coverage.
Throughout this tutorial, I've been applying each of these techniques to a single base for demonstration purposes. The end result is a good example of tropical (or wetlands) terrain.
There's no reason to take things this far on every single base. In fact, quite the opposite.
These techniques I've outlined are best as finishing touches, used in conjunction with one another to refine the theme of a miniature and its base.
Still, the sky is the limit -- there is virtually no plant life that you can't recreate in miniature somehow.