A few more bushes for the jungle.

One thing my scenery collection lacks is some more basic bushes and jungle foliage.  My bag of reindeer lichen has served me well for over 20 years but following my recent terrain making spree I wantn something a bit different.

I bought a couple of those "hanging-plastic-grass/plant-sphere-things" a few years ago because they looked like they would come in handy.  Most of the acquarium type plants I looked at would be OK for 28mm but just look too large for 15mm.  The hanging spheres had much smaller leaves in tiny clumps, so seemed much more useful for smaller scale scenery.

Do people really decorate their homes with these?

 The spheres were about 6" in diameter and by the time I stripped off all the little tufts I had a satisfying amount ready for use.  There were 2 types, one with small, pointed leaves and another with larger, widely spaced leaves rather like cress. The small pointed leaves come 4 to a clump but have an odd-shaped concave base, so need to be snipped off and mounted individually.  The larger leaves have an easier to conceal flat cross-shaped base.

I've created one larger jungle base as a test.  This is just a roughly shaped piece of foamex board with the edges bevelled and some holes drilled for individual stalks of vegetation.  I started drilling right through the foamex but decided part way through that only partway through would be better - less chance of gluing the base to my cutting mat!  Note the plants stuck to washers too, more on these later in this post.

Foamex base prepared and holes drilled.

The stalks were glued in with UHU and brown acrylic caulk was smeared over the exposed areas of foamex.  I mainly used the small-leaved plants with just a few of the larger leaves for variety.

Vegetation attached and caulk applied.

First holes drilled through but others only part way.

Vegetation attached and caulk applied.

I painted it with the usual mix of Wilko tester pot browns, then added a sprinkling if my "forest floor" mix which includes dried tea-leaves, tiny pieces of coir, fine shredded foam in various shades of green).

Jungle with occupant.

I left some more open areas within the scenery, these allow me to either place figures within it or larger trees/plants.

Jungle.

Jungle with extra palm trees (more on these another day).

I was wondering how to paint the leaves but in the end I decided I'd leave them as they are.  The colour is quite nicely graduated on them and I'm not sure anything I did would look much better. 

Jungle.

I also stuck a few of the larger leaf clusters onto washers. Some are single clusters, some are stacked pairs and I added a finer leafed stalks into the last one.  The washers were slathered in acrylic caulk, then texture paint (paint, filler, sand) to fill the hole in the middle and hide the plastic base. These were flocked the same as my other scenic bases.  They look a bit humpy but lots of plants gradually accumulate a chunky root base (I'm painfully aware of this having spent several hours over the last 2 weeks in the garden with my trusty mattock hacking out a clump of bamboo) so they don't look out of place.  They tend to work best in clusters rather than individually.

 I still have a vast supply of the leaf clumps, I just need to find the time to make some more jungle bases now.