A Bumper Apple Harvest

I like tinkering around with bits of terrain and scenery.  I always think this is most fun when the items being tinkered with are things you've had hanging around for a while - maybe they're even items you've been using in games and which need to be freshened up a little bit.  I've been meaning to try and produce a couple of apple trees in 28mm for some time, and the two small trees I had earmarked for the job (very nicely produced by The Last Valley) have been sitting on a shelf forlornly for at least two years.

One of the things about the current world isolation and lockdown is having the chance to pick up some of the projects we might have placed on the back-burner for some time.  I therefore "painted" the trees with very-slightly diluted PVA glue, which really made the trees a lot more solid, added them to a base (from Warbases), did the groundwork, and then started to produce the "apples" from green-stuff.

Errr..... yes, dear readers, I made the apples from green-stuff.  It's not as mad as it seems.  (OK, well, it is a little bit mad, but please - don't give up yet).  Here's some apples - Bramleys - from the trees in my garden last autumn.  Some big, some small, a great many are misshapen, and the colours are definitely non-uniform.  

So, in other words, they're perfect to be re-created in green-stuff.  They didn't take long to produce - I did about 50.  Put on iPlayer, Netflix or a DVD (I chose the very good "Richard II" in "The Hollow Crown" series) and the time flies.

Then, when the apples have set, superglue them to the branches.  I also did a few windfalls on the ground and also added a couple of green-stuff eggs for some chickens I had painted recently.  The eggs are a bit large - as some posters on Twitter correctly noted - but hey, it was Easter and that's the time for all sorts of miracles.

When the apples are securely glued on, they're easy to paint with a base of light-ish green (Vallejo Lime Green), and a glaze of red (Vallejo Red and Dark Vermillion).  I'm enjoying using the Vallejo Glaze Medium - just take Vallejo Red (or Dark Vermillion for some variety), and dilute with the Vallejo glaze medium, and the result is a (hopefully) realistic tone for the apples both on the tree and collected in the apple barrels.  The eggs got painted a shade of peachy-ivory.  (And a big shout out and thank you to Nick - Moiterei - for suggesting the Vallejo Glaze Medium on the comments on this Blog some months back!)

And that was it.  Hopefully allowing battles to take place in an orchard, and for the Flemish apple harvest to be looted for years to come!

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