Painting 3D printed Pine Trees

In this guide, we’ll show you how we painted our 3D printed pine trees from our latest campaign Throne & Ash. These new 3D printable STL files are perfect for creating and painting realistic pine trees for your scenery projects. We’ll cover the painting process and the technique we used for adding flock to the trees. It’s really simple, and they look great, so you’ll be whipping up forests in no time.

You’ll need:

• Pine Trees STLs
• Black primer
• Dark brown, grey, and green acrylics
• Light brown, grey, and green acrylics
• PVA
• Darker flock
• Lighter flock

Painting

The first step is to prime your trees. We’ve chosen black here as the natural shadows created will help us in the hard-to-reach areas between branches.

The next step is to base coat your pine trees in dark brown (we used Citadel Dryad Bark) and the rocks and plants at the base in dark grey and dark green (we used Deathworld Forest and Mechanicus Standard Grey, both by Citadel).

The final step in the painting is a dry brush of our lighter acrylics over the pine tree, the rocks, and the plants. We used Vallejo German Cam. Pale Brown for the wood, Administratum Grey and Elysian Green from Citadel on the rocks and plants.

To add the flock, we applied PVA to the tips of the branches with an old brush, then dipped the pine tree in the dark green flock, sprinkling it on in places that were hard to get.

You can finish here and have some fantastic-looking pine trees for your scenery. But we can go one stage further for a bit of realism.

Using the same method as before, we apply the PVA this time to the very tips of the branches over the previous flock and roll in a lighter green flock. We want some of the darker flock to show underneath so we get a natural highlight in our pine trees.

And there you have it, one finished Pine tree. All up this was maybe 10 minutes of actual work, but waiting for PVA to dry between steps added some more time. We hope you like it. You can find our pine trees files here, a part of our Throne & Ash campaign.