Making plants to be used for cabbage, water lilies, jungle terrain or woods

Hi folks,

sometimes I don´t have the inspiration and motivation to paint figures and like to build some terrain.

I love to use natural material and also to try several things that could be used for our hobby.

Maybe I´m crazy and may have sniffed too many times on super glue (I´ll have to ask my doc if any consequential damages could appear) but I started to build my own plants that could be used as cabbage  on fields or as water lilies, jungle terrain or woods.

A few months ago I had closer look on some pinecones like the ones you can see on the following picture.

Our gaming group has the plan to start with OperationSquad and so we bougth several figures for some Pacific scenarios. 

Therefore we will need a lot of jungle terrain and I thought of jungle plants as I had a closer look on the pinecones.

The pinecones in original.

So I started to strip of the smaller parts of the pinecone and their shape inspired me to try building jungle plants.

The stripped pinecone.

Different shapes of the stripped pinecone.

I just put some miliput and fixed it on small plastic strips.

Then I glued some of the pinecone leaves on the bases.

To give it a more realistic look I put two layers of leaves one above the other.

The twice layered plants.

As the leaves are very fragile I used "future".

My friend Franz brought some of this sealing lacquer from his trip to the United States and was fascinated about its quality.

He uses it for varnishing his figures before using matt varnish. 

It makes the figures more resistible especially soft or hard plastic figures.

He gave me some of the lacquer and I decided to try it on the plants.

The plants sealed with "future".

The whole work showed in the pictures above took me about a quarter of an hour.

So it is not that time intensive and also helps to cool down from other things of real life.

Now the only thing is to wait for the lacquer to be dry.

The next step will be to paint the plants in different shapes of green.
Before that I fixed the "plants" on cork for a better painting.
Sorry for the bad quality of the picture.

Thereafter I just painted the plants in different shapes of green using the AndreaColors Green Set.
I also glued some flowers on the middle.
I chose to give the plants a look that could be used for woods. 
But I´m sure that the plants could be used for other things, too.

The ready painted plants.

A complete flocked base.

And just another one.

Several finished bases placed next to each other.

This is how it could look like on a wargamer´s table.

Hope you like it - ;)

Cheers

Mike