Afternoon,

I’ve been trying a few things to make alien vegetation recently. I’ve been mostly thinking about cactii and succulents and also my favourite plant (my other, not model related hobby) Adenium Obesum.

I absolutely love them – fantastic plants, not the easiest things to keep though.

For my alien plants I know I want something like that, an odd confusion between a smaller plant and a tree. Not unheard of either – look at the size of these giant cactii:

So, there’s the real life inspiration. From a modelling perspective I tried this already once using clump vegetation, which I’ve decided I’m not a massive fan off (it looks good, but it’s so messy and difficult to affix) so I’ve been looking at sculpted vegetation.

I love the old 6mm Snapdragon range, which had sculpted bushes

There’s something about it that seems to ‘fit’ with the miniatures more than super realistic ground works.

So here’s where I’m at so far

The little green blobs on the taller stem will have smaller ‘bushes’ sculpted onto them and there’ll be more shrubbery on all the other stems and on the ground. Confusingly the Sculpey and Green Stuff are sort of the colour of plants, but these will be painted with red vegetation (I like pops of red when it comes to desert basing and terrain) – not settled on the trunk colour yet. I’ve got a LOT more sculpting to do before that though:

There’s room for an 18mm base (my normal, infantry base size) between all the plant groupings on those bases too. 5 bases in total (all somewhere around 70×40) should give me a nice bit of table coverage.

For future desert terrain I’ll sculpt a few bushes on the bases based on the shrubbery from here.

The purple chaps from the last post are still ticking along in the evenings, hopefully I can box those off soon.