Palms

Remember that lot of Chinese plastic palm trees of different styles that I got a few months back?  Well, they all have a plastic "spike" on the bottom and thus require some kind of basing. After dry brushing the leaves and trunks, I  came up with this:

They are composed of 40mm round masonite bases (purchased in bulk each year from Gale Force 9 at Historicon, and wine corks cut down and glued on top, and then a suitable size hole drilled through both with an electric drill (left side of picture).

I then mixed up several batches of Durham's Rock hard Water Putty and added a generous amount of brown craft paint to color it. The putty was applied to the bases and around the sides of the corks. After drying overnight, I painted both a darker shade of brown, again with latex craft paint. 

I then mixed up a custom batch of Flock from those I had on hand - medium coarse dark brown with some yellow dark green mixed in. White glue, slightly thinned, was then brushed liberally onto the bases and corks, trying to avoid the holes, and dipped into the flock mixture. 

I was going to glue the "stems" into the cork bases, but they fit very snugly, so I left them "loose". That makes it a lot easier to store and transport them!

In all, there are the following, with the colors I used for dryu brushing the truinks and then the leaves:

20 tall trees with frond like leaves - Crartsmart khaki, CC Leaf Green

16 short trees with palmate leaves - CC Light Chocolate, Folkart Bayberry

10 shrubs with large pa;mate leaves - CC Toffee Brown, CC Seminole Green

6 shuns with frond like leaves - CC Cinnamon, Craftsmart Hunter Green

(there are a few more trees than bases; that was all I had!)

I think this gives me a very nice variety of sizes, shapes, and colors of palms!