Walking Dead Wednesdays: The Great Outdoors

A big thanks to all of those that checked out my comic last week! The response was great and I hope that you’ll check out the issue next month as well.

Speaking of that issue, I’m moving forward in the Days Gone Bye expansion campaign and that will take me out of the city and into the wilds.  That means I need a few new pieces of terrain, namely trees. Lots of trees.

I was looking around for good tree options both homemade and manufactured and settled on a set of deciduous trees from Woodland Scenics.  After getting them, I decided to leave them unflocked because I couldn’t find any greyscale flocking and I didn’t want to just start spray painting the regular stuff. Luckily, I can always pretend that the campaign is occurring during winter or late fall/early spring.

The trees come stock in a brownish-grey which actually is really close to my black and white set up. This is awesome as it means I didn’t even have to try to paint them.  I may still eventually paint them but for now, I think they’ll work just fine.

The branches come flat in these sets so you have to bend the branches into natural positions.  This was actually pretty fun and easily accomplished while catching up on some tv shows I was behind on.

The main issue I’ve found with trees on tabletop terrain is they are too top heavy and can be annoying as they catch on things and scatter all over. Weights are usually mandatory but I had a better idea: magnets.  Magnetizing the trees to the base templates allows them to stay put and be easily removed when I want.  I will note that Woodland Scenics’ trees come with optional trunk bases so if you glued them down, you could easily remove the main tree and yield the same result. I like the templates flat so magnets won out in the end for me.

I drilled holes in the bottom of each tree trunk base until it was deep enough for the magnet then stickered over the hole and magnet to keep everything in place. Unlike my Dropzone Commander minis, I didn’t use glue as the sticker will be there to hold everything.  Make sure to get your magnet orientation correct or you’ll run into issues later. Since I drilled through the trunk, some of the tree posts were a little long and needed trimming before they would sit in flush to the trunk base.

I decided to use the stock tree templates from Mantic as my base but they are in color and I can’t have that.  So, like I did with the new boards I made, I scanned the template images in, converted them to black and white, and printed them on a large label sheet. Since my entire Walking Dead set is black and white, I don’t have an issue destroying the actual templates so I’ll sticker the new black and white image on top of the real template.

Next I drilled holes into the existing templates for the magnets to go into, placed them in, making sure to keep them all in the correct orientation to match my trees, and then placed the b/w template sticker over the top to keep the magnets in place. On the back side, just like the trees, I placed small stickers to keep the magnets firmly in place.

And done. Trees that won’t scatter to the slightest touch or knock over when someone hits the table.

Now it all comes together.  I have my trees and their base templates, my new Mantic image boards, and a hastily done papercraft RV all ready to roll.

Damn. Another Grimes family outing ruined by walkers.