Making the most of your palms

I’ve had a collection of plastic palm trees for my North African tables for some time now and they looked fine, but after seeing some excellent jungle terrain pieces recently, I decided to try to pimp my palms a little. Here’s the first batch!

I began by pulling the palm fronds off the trunks and temporarily sticking them on cocktail sticks (or kebab sticks for the larger trees). Prime them with a dark or mid green spray. I used AP Army Green, I think. Then I gave them a very heavy dry-brush of CdA Army Green, followed by a lighter dry-brush of a VMC green (833 whatever that is). I also dry-brushed a few of the lower fronds with a light brown.

I primed the trunks with either a light brown or mid brown spray (AP Skeleton Bone and Leather Brown). The smoother ‘banded’ trunks were painted in a range of light browns whilst the more gnarly trunks were painted darker brown and washed with GW Agrax to bring out the texture, followed by a quick highlight of a light brown.

This is a WIP pic of the leaves. Highlights in a range of greens and yellows would look best. Appears quite shiny mainly due to the lighting, although I did give the finished articles a light dusting of AP matt varnish to remove any residual shine.

Here’s the new and the old side by side. Definitely an improvement I reckon!

A couple of evening’s work but worth it.