This weekend I started doing some trees and shrubs for my tabletop terrain.

What you need to build the trees and shrubs is some big enough nails, metal wool ( for sanding / use the finest you can get), cheap oregano ( it doesn’t have to taste good !) at least 500 g for 10 trees and ten shrubs, a hot glue gun, an airbrush or a black and a green spray can, spray glue, paper beer mats and a well ventilated workspace.

So now what I did  with all this. First I cut out oval or round discs out of the paper beer mats. These will be the bases of the trees/shrub. Then I took a nail and glued it with the hot glue gun to the beer mat like so:

Then I cut of a piece of the metal wool ( use a pair of old scissors for this as they won’t be sharp afterwards) and shaped it into a tree form. Thereafter put some hot glue on the top of the nail and slip the metal wool over the nail. Be careful not to burn your fingers.

The shrubs were made by hot gluing the metal wool directly to the beer mat.

You could use different sizes of nails to do different trees I only had one size of nails at hand.

The next step is spraying the whole tree/shrub black. I used an airbrush you can use a spray can of course anyway be sure to have a well ventilated area to work in. Next you spray the tree/shrub with spray glue (wait for the black paint to dry first) and put a generous amount of oregano over the tree/shrub. Leave that to dry over night and buy yourself a pizza because you will be very hungry when the house smells of oregano 🙂

Once dry shake of the oregano excess and spray the tree in green color. Let that dry and give the beer mat a good covering of fine and coarse sand like you do with the rest of the scenery you have . You should have something like this then:

In this picture the sand on the base is still missing. I will post more pictures when the trees are finished.