Profile Page for GAMER

Grape Stem Trees

[ View ]

	Abstract :	Grape stems can be used to make excellent trees for gaming. Each tree is unique and they look quite good on a gaming table. While gathering enough stems is time consuming, building the trees is fairly simple. A girl at work loves grapes, so I scrounge stems from her. Another idea I never had to try was checking a local caterer or restaurant to see if they use grapes and if they would save the stems. Once dried, clean it up as needed and put the stem onto a base. I use 1 1/2" squares of styrene. If it is a large stem, weighting the base with rocks or making is larger may be necessary. A large tree is usuall top heavy, so don't be afraid to enlarge the base size. If you want smaller trees, a stem can be cut into smaller pieces before mounting it to a base. One stem will make several trees for 15mm scale. I have found that it is easier to paint and flock the base before puting foilage on the tree. Once the base is done, the only part left is to add foilage. I use Woodland Scenics Foilage Clusters. Break the clusters up into smaller, irregular shaped pieces. I glue them onto the grape stems with elmers glue. I try to glue each piece of foilage to at leat two pieces of grape stem to help it hold better. Smaller trees are actually pretty durable, although far from indestructable. Larger trees tend to have pieces break off from time to time, but the damage is usually easy to cover up/repair.
	Created :	Dec. 16, 2001, 01:52PM
	Author :	GAMER
	Hits :	1097
	Comments :	0
	Rating :	Not Yet Rated

Right after getting the bridge mold I saw a picture of a fantasy castle with four "sub-towers" fanning out from the central tower. After the usual Oooh, Aaah, I said, I could build that! From there on I was driven to make a tower with sub-towers. After some thought on the idea, I decided an Elfin Prayer Tower was a good theme, (if for no other reason other than to get Todd Goss fired up!)

I have wanted to build a Norman Keep for some time, and this spring I finally started. I built this "small" keep to try out some of the techniques for the larger one. My ideas worked out well and I ended up with a very nice looking experiment.

Once I had accumulated over 20 molds, I got to thinking one night on how you could improve on the Wizard's Tower. I started experimenting, then building, then before long I had a bigger and better version of the Wizard's Tower. I used pieces from 10 different molds plus one home made mold to build it.