Starting on some Jungle Terrain

 With both Modern African conflicts and Mayan inter-city-state warfare potentially on my wargaming table, I knew I needed some jungle terrain! I ordered some basic plastic palm trees and a couple assortments of smaller plastic plant bits off Amazon, got some irregular MDF terrain bases from Things From The Basement, and have now set to work. 

The MDF bases were primed, and then between 1 and 4 palm trees (six bases have 1, three bases have 2, and the largest base has four) were glued to each one. Once the glue had dried overnight, I went over the bases with Folkart "Coffee Bean" craft paint, a nice medium brown that's pretty close to the "Basic Dirt" color I use for miniature bases. 

Oddly, the tree assortment I bought gave me 2 tall trees and 14 medium ones...

Once this had dried, I went over each one with some thinned down PVA glue and gave them a coat of the Woodland Scenics "earth" flock I use for bare dirt. Once that had dried overnight, I splodged on some more glue, thinned down a little further this time, and used my mixed green Woodland Scenics (a blend of coarse medium green flock and fine darker green flock) to create some undergrowth.

This morning, I took these outside and gave them a couple good coats of spray varnish to help seal the greenery down. It's looking like it will be a rainy weekend and first half of next week, so I'll use that time to work on trimming plastic plants and hot gluing them down; I'm taking some inspiration from Mike over at Lead Legionaries for how he's done some of his jungle terrain, though I'm not taking the extra step of drilling holes in the MDF for plant stems to slot into. A lot of the plants I've bought are bushy, ferny affairs so I'm not too worried about them staying where I want them. 

Depending how these turn out, I'll probably end up doing a second set of 10 down the line; maybe with some elevation to them built up in cork. We're getting into the colder, wetter months of the year, so pretty soon I'm going to need to focus on stockpiling primed figures to last me through the worst of it. 

Speaking of...

I got a package from Badger Games today, with some more African figures from The Assault Group. I got a dozen more militia that will form two additional units for General Mutende's Army:

The more lightly-armed guys will form a Militia unit, while the guys with AK-47s will form General Mutende's bodyguard. I also ordered a few packs of Modern British soldiers to use as UN peacekeepers, but things went a bit awry - I was missing a command pack, and I'd received a mislabeled blister:

Those are in fact WWII Ghurkas in there! Oops! I've already reached out to Badger Games about the mixup, so hopefully that will be sorted quickly. I've also bought an STL of a Ferret Armored Car, which I'll have my buddy Dave print for me at 28mm scale to accompany my UN forces. 

I'll have these all cleaned and based by the end of the weekend as well, in order to be ready to prime as soon as we have an appropriately dry day. 

Figures Acquired in 2025: 199

Figures Painted in 2025: 162