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I started making some scatter jungle terrain last Friday, and have continued with them this week on lunch breaks. Now it's time for another long hobby night today!

I can't come up with any cohesive article on how everything is made and why. It's a big mess, and there's several things going on at the same time (mainly because stuff often needs to dry for a while), so this has been quite a chaotic process. Some of the pictures hopefully speak for themselves on what's going on. I might try to write a summary on some of the favorite materials and methods in the end, because I've tried a bunch and these seem to vary and change as I go along.

At this point however, I'd like to point out three major things:
* Plastic plants and leaves. Looking stupid at first, but might just come out great in the end.
* Assorted pizza herbs for ground cover. Yummy.
* I'm making some of the LEGENDARY OLD SCHOOL green cactus balls with red spikes sprouting out on all directions. Now I'd like to now how to paint hundreds of cocktail sticks red BEFORE I stick and glue them into the balls, so I don't have to worry about being neat when painting them...??? Any tips would be very welcome!

Anyways, here's some messy WIP shots. Much more pics at my blog.

Interesting. I like where that's going. Clever ground cover as long as nothing tries to eat it

I need some trees, this gives some inspiration

 RegularGuy wrote:
Interesting. I like where that's going. Clever ground cover as long as nothing tries to eat it

I need some trees, this gives some inspiration

Thanks for the comment RegularGuy! Much appreciated. Also glad I can share inspiration.

Now here's a bit of progress already. Thanks Unslain @ YakTribe forum for the great tip on using corrugated cardboard for holding cocktail sticks & spray painting them. This was exactly the kind of idea I was looking for, and luckily had just bought pizza that had the perfect type & size of cardboard for this. Now I just have to finish the green balls and their bases before sticking all the bright red sticks in. In case all this green-cactus-balls-with-red-spikes-thing is unfamiliar, or you'd like to have a dose of nostalgia, I just found this awesome reference pic from the internet!

Here we go:














Here's some of the finished pieces. I'm very happy how the bases turned out. Also loving the dead trunks that are made from cabsticks / pepe cones. 1000% recommended material. Now the plastic toy trees look absolutely silly if inspected closely, but when deployed en masse I think they'll be great for gaming purposes. For display, I dug out an old Warhammer Fantasy Battle Vampire Lord from late 90's, who's having an argument with some Elves I painted around 2003.

I've built some jungle terrain but nothing like yours. I never thought to use leaves that are that big. It looks great. Your rock towers are great too. I may need to borrow how you made them. Excellent work!

That jungle terrain really is brilliant, it looks so lush and dense!

Thanks for the very nice comment guys!


Did some work on the terrain last evening, and varnished them today as it was very nice weather outside. Then an ant showed up on one of the cacti. I naturally startled and dropped the whole tray of the terrain. Only broke a couple of the cocktail stick spikes, which were then easy to fix up and paint with pure red. I just LOVE these old school cacti. A few more pics at my blog as usual.




















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And here we have a situation among all the bigger jungle trees, piles of rock and the cacti. An Ork Weirdboy was spotted gathering some fungi, but the local group of Scavvy Jungle Boys had other ideas...

Those are some GIANT cacti. They look good though. The rock pillars also look amazing. The other plants though, look out of scale to me, but then again, there are some plants with giant leaves IRL, so it's just me. That point aside, they also look good.

Heh, cactus balls turned out great ... they're having this retro sci-fi ambiguity if they're just very big plants or rather very, very, very big germs ^^

Those cactus balls are very old school. They look great, though.

Very cool jungle, love the old school spiky balls, looking forward to seeing more
What are you using to make the balls?

Great alien jungle, the cacti hit me right in the nostalgias! I quite like the scale of the leaves, I always imagined death world plants to be huge. I’d be tempted to throw a few other colours in, maybe purples to go with the Purple Earth theory?

I've tried to make some similar jungle terrain, and I'm really struggling with painting the plastic plants, how do you do yours?