Late last year, I followed Ana Polanšćak's TUTORIAL on making trees and made a small forest.
The base is MDF with cork board and hot glue here and there on the top, with the bottom painted, PVA-covered and stretched to fix the warping. Grass is mostly MIG. Trees (real branches glued together, with sculpted fungi here and there; somewhat fragile) were basecoated with sprays, then painted using a primary school-grade brush with Renesans Flow art acrylics with a wonderful matt finish, plus some other paints I had around, with a photo reference of real tree trunks.
The varnish is a matt spray from the Action store, which hopefully preserved the paintjob while making the finish somehow less matt. That's exactly what a Citadel varnish would do, but five times cheaper.
