Jungle Terrain- Construction

I had been stockpiling plastic jungle trees and fake plants for some time before I decided that I should actually build something out of them to make room for more junk.  I took some in- progress shots of these pieces while I was building them.

There are a total of 9 pieces in the jungle terrain set. 8 of them are based on old AOL CDs and one is a foam hill.

This is an example of a typical piece. The plastic jungle trees are Games Workshop. They were cleaned and assembled as normal. The leaves were given a green wash and the trunks were given a brown wash.

The CDs were prepped by covering the hole with masking tape. The GW trees were then superglued into place and various plant parts were attached to the base with hot glue. White glue was used to attach pebbles to the bases. These pebbles were obtained by sifting regular playgound sand through a collander.

This man-eating plant is actually the head of a Resident Evil toy. It is made of hollow, soft rubber so it was filled with plaster of paris and allowed to dry so it would hold its shape. More plastic plants were glued on and a plastic vine was placed around a tree stump which is actually part of the arm of the same toy. The hard, plastic stump was washed with brown ink. The man- eating plant was not washed because the rubber would not take ink. It just pooled up and looked crappy.

These two tall trees were made from the same Resident evil toy. The top portions are the toy's arms and the bottom is the toy's root- like feet. The two parts were simply pinned together and the joint was resculpted to look like one continuous piece. The trees were given a brown wash and more vines were glued up their length to help hide the joints of the former arms and legs.

I wanted to create a stagnant pond in the jungle set. This was done by cutting a piece of coruugated cardboard to fit on the CD and then cutting the pond out of the center. Bits of cardboard were used to fill in the area around the tree roots. The carboard was simply hot glued into place.

Wall filler was used to cover the cardboard and to give the pond bed a more even transition from the cardboard edge to the bottom of the CD. It also hides the corrugations of the cardboard.

Here is a shot of my old "workbench" (which was really a $15 Walmart desk) during the project.