Forest stands for the Ardennes - Finished.

 Here is my walkthrough on how to make these stands. 

Back in August 2012 I visited my brother who lives in the USA. The point was to see him and also go to Gencon. While there he got me interested in DnD and Pathfinder, and showed me how he had recently begun vaguely painting miniatures again since neither of us had done it in years. I decided to get painting miniatures again and committed myself to basing up infantry figures to play Crossfire, the WW2 wargame with no measuring. As such, I bought a box full of these MDF squares and rectangles. I based up three squads of 20mm Skytrex British Infantry and that was the end of that journey. I have yet to play those rules, and the infantry have since been removed from the bases. These squares have just sat in a box for nine years, with me occasionally dipping in to base crewed weapons. 

Now is their moment to shine. I drilled holes in, after measuring the width of the drill bit. The trees are all cheap Chinese trees and are pretty awful. I used a proper electric drill as my craft drill is dreadful.

I then glued the trees into the holes. Some of them needed me to chop the trunk a bit as it was pointed and wouldn't have stayed upright.

I then textured the bases with my Vallejo earth texture paste. After this dried I brushed PVA glue onto the trees and dipped them into a tub of their own fallen off leaves. Then they were primed with a green primer, which darkened them, but is a bit shiny. I might have not shaken it up enough. Generic brown craft paint applied to the bases. Also a few trees have been drybrushed with a lighter green. I disliked how uniform they were. They are still kind of uniform, but at a later date I might go over some of them again.

Heavy drybrush of sand colour on the bases, then some static grass and clump foliage and hey presto - I have some finished fir tree stands. I also ordered a pack that was sold as "1.6kg of MDF bases of various shapes and sizes". I will be using this to make more stands on rounder bases. Overall I am happy with how they turned out and will be happier with the future, more circular stands that I will be making.