Model Spruce Trees

A High Elf patrol makes its way through the dense forests of Yvresse.

While deciduous trees are nice, there's something special about a dark and mysterious forest made up of conifers! Being from Sweden, a spruce tree is never too far away, so building a few for my gaming table seemed like an obvious choice. 

This photograph was taken before the trees were mounted on bases.

This summer, I therefore decided to add a number of model spruce trees to my collection. I built a few prototypes around two years ago, but those four or five trees were obviously not enough for a proper forest! With the prototypes and the newly made trees, I had enough for six bases, which should cover most of my needs. 

I imagine these could represent all manner of forests from across the Warhammer world, from the mysterious Elven forests of Ulthuan to the dangerous Reikwald of the Empire. Or why not a forested moon in the 41st Millennium?

All six woods arranged in front of my painted forest backdop.

The first trees I built had trunks made from wooden dowels (plant stakes from a garden centre), with holes drilled into them for inserting the branches. Drilling all those holes was a lot of work, so after getting my own 3D printer, I started thinking about a solution to the problem. I ended up designing a basic 3D model of the trunk in Tinkercad, with the holes for the branches already incorporated. I printed out a number of these and used them for the next batch of trees. This worked really well and saved me a lot of time. 

I'm planning to write a proper step-by-step guide explaining how I made the trees and to make the 3D design available through Cults 3D or a similar platform. Keep an eye out for that in the future!

In the meantime, enjoy these photographs of my finished woods!