Making the most of your palms

I’ve had a collection of plastic palm trees for my North African tables for some time now and they looked fine, but after seeing some excellent jungle terrain pieces recently, I decided to try to pimp my palms a little. Here’s the first batch!

I began by pulling the palm fronds off the trunks and temporarily sticking them on cocktail sticks (or kebab sticks for the larger trees). Prime them with a dark or mid green spray. I used AP Army Green, I think. Then I gave them a very heavy dry-brush of CdA Army Green, followed by a lighter dry-brush of a VMC green (833 whatever that is). I also dry-brushed a few of the lower fronds with a light brown.

I primed the trunks with either a light brown or mid brown spray (AP Skeleton Bone and Leather Brown). The smoother ‘banded’ trunks were painted in a range of light browns whilst the more gnarly trunks were painted darker brown and washed with GW Agrax to bring out the texture, followed by a quick highlight of a light brown.

This is a WIP pic of the leaves. Highlights in a range of greens and yellows would look best. Appears quite shiny mainly due to the lighting, although I did give the finished articles a light dusting of AP matt varnish to remove any residual shine.

Here’s the new and the old side by side. Definitely an improvement I reckon!

A couple of evening’s work but worth it.

74-Z Speeder Bikes

Two units of 74-Z speeder bikes to give my Galactic Empire forces some fast attack options. I’ve also re-done the basing scheme to use only white flowers and red tufts, both from gamers grass. All of my other troops had the first lot of tufts and foliage removed and replaced with this. Gives a much more coherent appearance.

These chaps should prove handy on the table. Move 3, surge to hit and to block, plus that blaster cannon packs a punch especially with the Impact 1 rule which will allow these guys to potentially tackle enemy armour. The white defence dice make them a bit fragile, but at least they generally get a cover save thanks to Cover 1.

Next on the list for the troops is either Vader or maybe an AT-ST. Although I might divert briefly to paint the Priority Supplies boxed set. Nothing says Star Wars (and specifically Tatooine) like a few moisture vaporators! Happy gaming 😎