Fairly Quick Hedges, A Photo Tutorial

These are only fairly quick if you ignore the fact that they sat around for about four months half-finished before I got bored of them taking up space on my project shelf and got them finished!

Actual construction time is quite short, nevertheless, and the results are solid enough for wargaming purposes.

hedge1
Raw materials for hedge making. Six inch hardwood tongue depressors, soft iron wire (from my local hardware store). Not shown, my hot glue gun.
hedge2
Adding wire loops, glued down with generous amounts of hot glue at the ends and where the loops touch down on the tongue depressors.
hedge3
After the hot glue cools and solidifies, paint a slightly dilute white glue/water mix over the tongue depressors and the wire and dump sand and hobby gravel (or a mix of both, as I use here) over. Leave overnight to dry.
hedge4
After the glue dries on the sand, paint. I use a mix of a couple shades of brown with a bit of black, and a generous amount (about 1 part in 3) of white glue to really solidly glue the sand down to the bases. Again, leave overnight to dry.
hedge5
Fire up the hot glue gun again. Using a mix of lichen and foliage foam, start hot-gluing foliage to the wire “branches”. You could glue real twigs in too, or add some plastic trees to the mix if you want more height to the hedges. I’ve left this batch fairly low, they’re very roughly chest-high to a 28mm model, with some sections head-high or better and rare breaks lower than that.
hedge6
The finished hedges on the left, alongside the first batch I did on the right. Each batch is four linear feet of edge (eight six-inch pieces), nowhere near enough if you’re doing Normandy but enough for smaller tables outside of Normandy!

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