Square Bashing Woods

There are still a few Square Bashing terrain tiles that I have left to make, so I turned my attention back to them. I wanted to make another smashed up forest, to go with the objective tile that I already have.
I was going for the 'typical' First World War woodland look, again:

This one was to be the normal size of a terrain piece for the game, ie, 12" by 6", so I took a piece of my pre-cut MDF. I wanted the forest floor to be cratered by shells so I grabbed the remaining shell holes from Early War Miniatures. Plus a very long time ago, Mark had given me some railway modellers trees that I had never had a use for before. These are plastic and already have the bare appearance of shell damaged trees, plus they each have a base which the tree can be removed from. This was perfect as I wanted the trees to be removable during a game, so they wouldn't interfere with the figures bases.

Taking a selection of the shell holes I glued them to the base with polystyrene cement. Then in between them, I glued the bases of the trees, obviously, without the trees in them:

The next stage was to add some Pollyfilla to the base to cover the tree bases and the edges of the shell holes, then this was left to dry over night:

When the base was dry, I painted thinned down PVA glue over the entire piece and sprinkled sand over it as well, to create texture. I also filled out the bottom of the shell holes with sand to take away the flat nature of them, caused by the vac-forming method they were made with.

Whilst the glue dried, I turned my attention to the trees. They are a bendy plastic tree which you are supposed to add flock to, to create the foliage. They are pretty simple but they fit my needs perfectly. Here one is in its normal state.

To create the tree, one has to bend the branches up in a natural fashion then twist the trunk a few times, as the plastic is bendy it stays in position when you've done this:

After all the trees were bent into shape, it was back to the base and the final stages. I sprayed the whole thing with some brown spray paint I had knocking about. This sealed the sand and also gave me the base coat for the rest of the shades.

I will no go through every stage of the actual painting, but suffice to say that I began with a heavy dry brush of Burnt Umber, with various blending stages provided by German Camo Black Brown, Khaki, and even Neutral Grey. The edges were sprayed with Dark Green, inkwashed in Flat Brown and drybrushed Yellow.

The trees were heavily brushed in German Camo Black Brown, with Khaki and Neutral Grey drybrushed over the top and the painting was finished!

However, it looked a little bare, with all that shellfire and fighting there would be chunks of trees and branches all over the forest floor. I added these from some real tree cuttings, broken up and sprinkled over the base. I then sealed them in with two layers of varnish.

And here it is with two British 18lbers for scale. With the flash on:

A close up without the flash:

With the removable trees it should be easy to use during a game and I'm pleased with how it turned out. Thanks for looking and I hope it gave someone some ideas!