Jungle Foliage

When Games Workshop repackaged aquarium plants and tried to resell them for a huge amount of money I was inspired to whip up some simple stands of dense jungle foliage. My first stop was to find a cheap supplier. I found www.wholesale-aquarium-plants.com (which is now , unfortunately, out of business). Instead of $10 for a mat of plants you could get them for $1.69.
Combining my fresh shipment of plastic plants with a rather large pile I already owned, I set to work.

I used MageKnight figure bases for the bases of these plants. They're round, sturdy and I have a lot of them. I simply popped the two halves of the bases apart with a screwdriver and covered any holes with masking tape if necessary.

After preping bases I pulled all of the plants off of the sprue. I then started clumping them together to see how many pieces I would need to get a full- looking base. Most of the bases required 10 plants; some only took 5.

Once the plants were arranged in a pleasing fashion I held them upside down in my hand an applied a huge glob of hot glue and pressed them onto the base.

The more hot glue you have, the longer it will take for it to cool and harden. Some of the pieces had to be held in place for some time before they would stand on their own.

Some of the plants were so rigid that they would not stand up at all. They were based a little differently. A small sliver of pink insulation foam about 1/4" thick was cut out and broke into an uneven , rock-like chunk. It was then hot glued to a MageKnight base. I then used the end of a small screwdriver to punch as many holes as I needed for all the plants into the foam.

Each of the plant pieces had a large hunk of plastic at the bottom with a hole in it. This was used to mount the plant to the sprue. I simply cut those off, put a dab of hot glue on the freshly cut end and then jammed them into the holes in the foam. The plants stayed in place nicely.

Once all the pieces were assembled I based them with my typical flock-static grass- ground tea leaves combination. This was attached with large amounts of white glue.

Once assembly was finished I spent some time pulling all of the hot glue strands out of the leaves of the plants. I'm not sure if there is a way to get around the spiderweb- like strands of hot glue.