From NoelW for Thursday: Cross my palm (100points)

Three short posts this week.

Continuing to push on with long-outstanding terrain, I decided to paint up and base the clutch of palm trees I’ve had waiting for two years. These will provide shady cover in the Western Desert of WWII, the Sudan, Napoleon’s Egypt and the Crusaders’ Holy Land.

I’ve based them in singles, twos and threes, a total of 40 trees on 19 bases. Some bases are metal, some plastic offcuts, some unwanted CDs. Each was textured with filler, sand and glue and then painted with Vallejo Sand Yellow (70.916), then drybrushed with a white/sand mix. It seems odd to paint sand the colour of sand, but that’s what I’ve done. Some of these bases now seem a little dark to me, so may need a bit further lightening, but the results are quite pleasing, I think.

I couldn’t find a way to photograph the whole lot in a single shot, so these are various angles and samples. Although there are four different species of tree, all the bases look pretty much the same. (The green things hanging from some of the trees are coconuts. Apparently they are a yellowy-green colour as they grow).

Once I’d got into I realised I’d collected far more palm trees than anyone might reasonably need. I’ve so many it’s really more of a forest than a desert.  I’ll never need to use them all at once – and storage is going to be an issue, too – so some of these will probably find their way to a Tabletop Sale, I expect.

For the purpose of points, if you regard them as one job lot and shove them all together, that would be 6” x 15" x 20", that's 1800 cubic inches, making 8.3 cubes, or 166 points. However, this is perhaps rather unreasonable, as only 5 of the stands are 6” high. If I calculate the volume of each stand separately then they sum to 1506 cubic inches which is 6.97 cubes or 139 points. As always, I leave the final arbitration to our generous-heart minion.

Boom a palm tree bomb! They look great,a very large oasis,or possibly on the edge of a middle Eastern city, or a Carribian island, you just need some pirate ships and crews,no,next week is fine!
Points wise I think I beg to differ as there is considerable space around the trees,I only say this as I have a pile of trees and have been trying to work out a fair way of calculating the area they take up,I will be generous and call them 5 stands so 100points to your total!

All the best Iain