Tuesday, May 24, 2022

Terrain: Magnetized Forest

 Forests can be great terrain pieces, but you need to be able to move the trees out of the way if a model wants to move into the forest. I've seen a number of solutions to the problem, but my personal favorite is magnetized trees.

 

 When I started this terrain piece, I had the idea of putting down fallen leaves on the forest floor. So after I cut the base out of craft plywood and painted it brown, I started looking for a leaf-shaped hole punch or something. In the end, I couldn't find one. I cut the leaves out of construction paper individually. I overlapped multiple pieces of paper so that it wouldn't be so painful, but it did still take quite a while, and I threw out a lot of badly-shaped paper leaves.


White school glue works great for gluing these down, as it becomes transparent when it dries. I also glued down a bit of scrub brush/grass stuff that I'd picked up years ago from a craft store.

  

 Magnetizing the trees was the interesting part. I had used green stuff to stick down three small metal washers before I even painted on the brown beneath the leaves. Then I carved small holes into the bottom of each tree and shoved in a small magnet, which I super glued in and covered with green stuff to prevent the magnet from being pulled out by its magnetic hold to the washer.

I also painted a small red X on each spot that held a hidden washer so that you could tell where to place the trees. It works very well.


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