Making 6mm wire trees...

For my 1:285 (6mm) Hex terrain I wanted to make everything from scratch, and that includes the trees that can be seen in many of the pictures posted on this blog...

For my 15mm Flames of War terrain I simply used store bought trees, the kind you can buy in any model railway shop. If I recall correctly, these were suitable gor H0-gauge... Mixing different brands and colors made for a convincing effect. This sollution was easy, reasonably affordable and allowed me to fill a good portion of my 160x240 table with woods and single trees...

Where the trees suitable for 15mm were easily available, finding trees for 6mm terrain proved a lot harder...

After an experiment with some wire I had left over from a previous project I figured I could make my own trees. So, I went in search for a thinner sort of wire (yet still strong), ordered 100m of the stuff and set about twisting as many trees as I could.

At the moment I have used about 60m of the wire, resulting in a lot of trees! But there is always room for more...

I use my trees in three different ways: as a single tree on a separate base, as a cluster of three trees on a separate base and fixed onto a Hex module.

The bases for the wire trees are shaped in such a way so that they can easily be combined into a larger forest...

I use three different shades of foliage, light, medium and dark green, all from Woodland Scenics... These colors, when combined, create a very nice and quite realistic effect. On most of the trio bases I only combine two of the shades as three different kinds of trees so close together would be somewhat improbable...

The picture above gives a good example of how the separate bases can be combined into a large wooded area while the separate trees can be used to dot the landscape...