Winter Wire Trees

A while ago, I planned a miniature wire trees tutorial, so here it is! Finally. Since it’s winter time, I’m going to build a leafless variant. Basically a tree for Frostgrave terrain. This particularly one, will be used for my upcoming nativity scene. My plan is to make a variant for each season. So stay tuned for upcoming tutorials.

I imagined this build way more complicated than it turned out to be.

What you’ll need

• Wire
• Pliers and wire cutter
• Air drying clay
• Mod podge
• Spray Primer (black, and/or grey, and/or white)
• Acrylic paints
• Static grass of different lengths
• PVA glue

Building miniature wire trees

First grab around 20 or more pieces of sturdy, but not too sturdy, wire of about 20 cm in length.

Now using a pair of pliers, to hold one end, start twisting the individual pieces to about a third of their lengths. There are some shortcuts to use a power drill for this step. Just have a quick search online. But, I found, it works as well without one

Then, start to twist individual branches out of the loose wire ends, until you’re left with single wire strands. Have a look at the image below, to see what I mean.

Texture

To give the miniature wire trees some thickness and texture, I applied some air drying modelling clay I found some time ago at our local cheapo store. I had to moisten my fingers to make it less tacky to my fingers. Bit that might depend on the clay you’re using.

After letting the tree dry overnight, I applied a coat of mod podge mixed with black acrylic paint. This gives your miniature wire trees a layer of extra strength and prevents the dried clay from chipping off the wire armature.

Details (Optional)

Once the black mod podge was dry, I primed the tree. But then I thought: maybe I should add more twigs. Ideally I could have used some fine dried up natural plant roots. But that wasn’t what I had on hand. Instead, using PVA glue, I applied some longer strands of static grass I had lying around. I didn’t know where this was going, but I gave it a go anyway.

The day after, while on the road, I realized the leafless trees outside were even more branched out. Thus I decided to add more, but shorter static grass to the tips of my finer branches.

My hope was to tie everything together during the following zenithal highlight priming step.

Painting the miniature wire trees

First, I primed the tree in black, grey and white to achieve a zenithal highlight / undercoat for the following painting step.

To speed up the painting process, I decided to use brown-grey paint from a spray can I had lying around.

Next, I dry-brushed the stem and the main branches with an off-white to bring out some of the texture.

Finally, I gave the tree a good coat of matt varnish to seal and further strengthen it.

And then, I was left with a rather neat looking miniature tree. Check out the details!

See you in spring for another wire tree tutorial.