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How would you make such hanging lichen for jungle terrain ?

Home-made if possible, unless cheap to buy and easily available

Thanks!

Maybe something like thin, teased-out lengths of cotton wool soaked in a mix of paint and a bit of PVA glue?

Crispy78 wrote:
Maybe something like thin, teased-out lengths of cotton wool soaked in a mix of paint and a bit of PVA glue?

Yeah, the 'classic' way is to get some sort of fibrous material, ripping it in tufts, later to fix them to the trees with paint and/or glue. I think something more coarse, like e.g. jute or other woody fibres would work best, and probably spray paint and spray glue (or e.g. hairspray, spray varnish etc.), to prevent the fibres from all clumping up and looking like algae or wet rags. There are a few tutorials on youtube, but they look not that good to be honest.

Thanks, will try these out and let you know how it went!

You could use actual lichen, whihc is chea and readily available in the general modelling world.

for example

https://www.wwscenics.com/product-category/lichen/

This would be much coarser at the scales wargaming tends to work at, but it has the benefit of actually being lichen, as well as being pretty robust normally

Oh, I just hate working with real lichen. It crumbles all over the place, falls apart, breaks. Maybe it's ok for static dioramas nobody is going to touch for years, but I would never use it for models or terrain that gets constant use, is transported between places etc.

I used it once, many decades ago, when I was starting in the hobby, and all of it got damaged so quickly that I never even thought of using it again.

Also, it's not the jungle hanging type.

I use individual strands of terrarium sheet moss as seaweed, but if you were to hang it from trees I think it would look the part of lichen.

You could wrap strips of sturdy adhesive tape over your branches to get a base structure, fray out the bottom end and glue fine grain flock all over it to get the texture. Might get a bit fiddly and messy until the glue is dry, but if it's something flexible light PVA glue it should bend rather than break, unless you're actually trying to damage it. It's about as sturdy a method as I can think of while providing something that looks the part.

So I tried out the cotton wool and water soluble white glue. My mistake was to actually use water. After dipping the wool looked like homogenous clumps and when put over surfaces looked more like some tarp or cloth than lichen.

I decided to use the thick glue straight from the bottle, mixed it with cotton wool between my fingers and it was much better. The sticky mix formed strings and "dreadlocks" just like I wanted it to do. Here what it looks like when hanging from terrain. I will update the thread with pictures once these are painted.

Thanks for all the suggestions, everyone!

[/spoiler]

Looking good! Lets see some paint on there

Looking good.

Painted test version attached to an already finished tree. You will need to wait quite a bit longer for all the bigger structures, though

Looks good!

Yeah, that looks pretty great, easily better than the examples on Youtube.

Thanks, everyone !

That looks really amazing. Thank you for sharing your progress.

Nice one, well done

If you want to give it that bit more texture you can experiment with a dab of white glue and a dusting it it with something like woodland scenic fine turf after you have painted it.

I would suggest that the fine turf can also be used for more mundane types of moss growing on the surfaces of your terrain pieces.

I had a short break from working on these pieces due to a 10-day holiday bike trip, but this was a week ago and since then I have finished the entire set up Here it is, as promised. Just some staged photos for now, tomorrow the first game on this board.

That looks awesome!

I'm intending to do something similar with my orky kill team terrain, so it looks like an overgrown jungle outpost. Making some mental notes for future reference for when I finally get round to it...

Crispy78 wrote:
That looks awesome!

I'm intending to do something similar with my orky kill team terrain, so it looks like an overgrown jungle outpost. Making some mental notes for future reference for when I finally get round to it...

I may have two pieces of advice:

-grind some coconut shell, it makes perfect jungle floor
-for gluing the above and all other powdery stuff to your terrain mix 1 part pva glue with 3 parts water and add a drop of dishwashing liquid. It has little surface tension so it flows into nooks and crannies but is still pretty sticky. Once the sprinkles are glued to the surface use another drop on top to seal them in place.

I tried it for the first time and it worked a charm!