Scenery: bamboo and shrubs

Okay, here is a story of how planning ahead a little would have saved me a bit of time and a lot of annoyance. I bought some cheap plastic bamboo and shrubs from China (€ 11 on Ebay for 150 pieces) to make some terrain to go with my feudal Japan-themed scenery.

Over at Tales of@TheBrummieDwarf I found this excellent post on how to make bamboo forests, in which Oasis floral foam is used as a basing material to keep the thin and long bamboo standing upright. I didn’t feel like going out to look for foam, however. Nor did I want to order it online and wait for it to be delivered. I wanted to start building right here and right now! So what I did instead was cut out some irregular shapes out of a sheet of polystyrene and hot glue the bamboo directly to them.

Halfway though texturing and painting the bases, however, the little bamboo buggers started to come loose one by one! Admitting defeat, I ordered some 10 mm sheets of blue foam at Scenery Workshop to base the bamboo properly. The foam arrived within two working days, which is pretty amazing considering that there is a pandemic going on.

I quickly set to cutting the foam to the shape of my polystyrene bases. However, because the bases were covered in hot glue and wall filler, the foam of course wouldn’t lay flat. Not wanting to bin the old bases and cut out some new ones, I had to slowly carve, chip and sand away the remnants of my failure. Argh! In the end, though, it all turned out fine. After gluing the foam to the bases, it was a simple matter of texturing the base with wall filler, pushing in the bamboo and giving the bases a quick coat of paint and flock.

The finished pieces look pretty good, but I could have giving them a few more brown washes, because they still have a bit of that cheap neon green look to them. I also found that I needed a lot more bamboo pieces per square cm than I had expected, so I only had enough to make two bases.

Conversely, the shrubs were no problem at all. All I had to do with these was cut off the stub on the back and hot glue them to the bases. A brown wash to get rid of the cheap plastic look and then it was a matter of painting and flocking the base. Job done!

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