First made a foam base, cut out a whole in the middle, glue a sheet of paper underneath and there we have the basic form. Ignore the tree trunk for now.
Then I had to decide how to fill up all the space on it. A quick trip to the floral shop got me some cheap plastic plants, a bunch of silk leaves and some spikey things which could act very well as some sort of cactus.. The spikey things have some plastic plants stuff glued on top, some other plastic plants are pinned into the softboard as vegetation.
The silk leaves were cut up to be palm fronds. The tree trunk mentioned earlier is a thin stick, bent with steam, wrapped with paper tape, then some thin string wrapped up and then finally covered in a tissues, wetted with water thinned woodglue
Around now attaching the fronds to the trunk are giving me a real hassle and my local gaming shop miraculously could order some Pegasus palm trees within a few days. So I ordered those, 3 palm trees, lots less hassle. This looked about right, time to get the base desert-fied.
So glued the palm stands on. Then blended them in with enough woodglue and but a thin coat over the entire base. Put basing sand on and let it dry. After that spray painted it black and painted the 'water' regal blue. So far so good, now I need to start rememberting the colour scheme we used on our big desert gaming board.
