Reeds, how to!

[Hammers]

Nicked from another thief. Obviously it works well for tall grasses to:

THE TAMBOOKIE GRASS CONUNDRUM - SOLVED!

I’m indebted to Mattspooner, whose VC sniper post the other day, has kindly provided the answer to my ‘how the hell to make tambookie grass?’ dilemma.
Thanks Matt! 

To recap: Aquarium grass is too bright, too plastic-looking, too regular, and too tall to serve.
Grass tufts are (disgracefully!) not available in anything taller than 10mm.
And faffing around with sisal string, paintbrush hairs, or railway modellers ‘reeds’ is just too time-consuming and fiddly to be practical for the expanse of tambookie grass I need to plant at one end of my board.

The solution - suggested by Matt’s post - is fake lawn.
It's a product I'd been unaware of before, which appears to be designed for people who can’t be bothered to mow their grass, and for play areas, office atriums, etc. It is astonishingly realistic from even a few inches away - nothing like the lurid green 'greengrocers' grass of old.

A quick online search brought up literally dozens of companies who make and supply this stuff in all sorts of grades and colours.

I sent an online request for free samples to three suppliers picked fairly randomly - and bugger me, within 24 hours, I had a batch of free sample pieces (8 pieces in total) from all three of them, each piece measuring about 200mm x 100mm. (If only wargames companies were half as responsive as this!)

Here’s a picture of some of them. As you can see, they come in different lengths and grades, from 20mm to around 35mm in height.



And a close-up...



You can see from the reverse that the 'turf' is made up of lots of individual tufts, machine stitched and glued onto a fabric / bitumen backing sheet. Each one of those little bumps is a tuft. That’s a heck of a lot of 28mm sized tufts, even in a sample piece 200mm x 100mm! And in fact, just one of these sample pieces should provide all I need for the purposes of this project.



Here are a few tufts, snipped into individual pieces and blu-tacked upright to form a loose spread of vegetation.




And here with a figure for scale and to show the overall effect 




Here’s a test tuft mounted onto a piece of card, textured around the foot of the tuft, and blended with a little flock. I also gave the ‘leaves’ a quick splodge of watered-down GW ‘snakebite leather’ to take the slight plastic shine off, and to make the clump look a little more dried out. (Obviously, I will paint these properly when it comes to making the actual tambookie grass forest).



And here with a figure for scale, from a couple of angles...






I’ve decided that I’ll create the finished tambookie forest by fixing the clumps in place with a hot glue gun. Then I’ll texture round the foot of each clump, intersperse with some shorter tufts, plus  flock, static grass and so on.

The overall effect will look like quite a dense forest of tall grasses - but open enough so that the figures will still be able to move fairly freely through the foliage.

The only slight reservation I have is that because the original product is designed to simulate neatly mown lawn grass, the longer leaves clearly have flat tops, as though mown!

On the whole though, I think I can live with this and put it down to the action of the burning African sun. Not to mention the browsing of elephant and wildebeest! 

I think it does the job. What do you think?

[Driscoles]

This is cool and probably the best idea since the invention of the wheel.
Thanks Hammers!!

[Mason]

Thanks, Hammers!

I made an order for a sample and, like you, received five different swatches.
I will be using them to make some stands of jungle undergrowth mixes with various aquarium plants for VSF, primarily.
Until then, though, they will see more immediate service as crop fields for my farm.
Not only a great idea, but free to boot, and usable as is!
Everyone should consider getting some artificial lawn and then decide;
NO, but they will look great on the gaming table!

Top tip, thanks again!

[Hammers]

Hey, don't thank me, i nicvked the  article from Captain Blood who's stolen it elsewhere.

[Mason]

I was thanking you because I stole it from your post!

Someone else must take a turn to steal it from me now!

[6milPhil]

Brill... I have a fair few samples ready to be mutilated.

[Matthew83]

Just ordered a selection, boy do I feel guilty.
I have a large range coming after giving the bloke on the phone an elaborate story about redoing the lawn (I even had measurements for him) and he sounded like he hadn't had an order in a while and was eager to please.
Oh dear, whilst he's writing up a quote for me, I'll be planning some new basing technique incorporating my ill gotten fake grass.

Maybe I should order a few more samples from other dealers to take my mind off the guilt and cheer myself up.