09-13-2025, 03:37 PM
Puffball trees and polyfil mats - I addressed these in the last two entries, and like I said, those can be 80% of the scenery on a hill or mountain or near against a backdrop. Once you get to the base of the hill or you're into the foreground areas of your area to model, trees need to look like trees including trunks and ground covers.
Once I'm through installing my puffball trees and I'm ready to attack the detail and/or foreground trees, I take a bit of time to generate the ground cover into which I'll mount my trees. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to install trees on a surface that doesn't look realistic. The handiest thing I've found for overall leafiness on the forest floor is a bunch of discarded scenic remnants that I can "green and brown stuff". I have a plastic bin of this stuff that is generated when I get the vacuum out or I clear off my desk from a scenery project. Ground foam, sawdust, pieces of pyramidal hydrangea, sedum, folidage clusters, and probably the most important item - coffee grounds. Heck, if you wanted to dry out your leftovers from your morning coffee, those would work, but I don't drink much coffee at home, so I bought a pound of cheap decaf that works just fine when I need to add to the green and brown stuff. The coffee grounds are just right for simulating deep forest dirt, which is loamy, rich and dark. Leaves will dry out on top of it and so lighter brown stuff looks realistic when applied on top of the coffee. Most of my forested areas also have a significant amount of understory and near the edge of the track, brambles and weeds. Foliage clumps and moss clumps in a variety of shades of brown and green do the trick. The ground covers get secured with a solid base coat of wood glue and additions can be attached with a some regular strength white glue followed by a diluted white glue solution.
Detail trees. I've built these in a number of ways with varying success. My first attempts were done with painted metal armatures draped with ground foam impregnated polyfil. I think it was a set of 10 trees, but the expense..... Had to be a more cost effective way.... I dug around my property for dried shrubbery in the fall - sedum, azalea, spirea. That made decent armatures that were draped with painted polyfil mat with some additional ground foam on top. From a decent distance? Not bad. Close up? Not really what I was shooting for.
I was out for a walk in the neighborhood with my wife in the early spring and noticed my neighbor's hydrangea seed heads. They are horticulturists at heart and have invested some decent money into non-standard shrubs and trees. Most hydrangeas have very round flower heads, but my neighbor's were pyramidal in shape and the flower petals in the spring had mostly all fallen off, resulting in a brown pryramid of branchy growth. I asked whether I could lop some off, and they were only more than happy to have me prune their shrubs. I got two very large garbage bags and I'm still working on exhausting the 2nd. The more formal name for these is a panicle hydrangea and they are reportedly very easy to grow:
Panicle Hydrangea: The Easiest Hydrangea to Grow - Birds and Blooms
Once I pull them out of the bag, I decide how big a tree and what type of tree I want to model. Since they are pyramidal, if I lop the top off of the seed head, I can easily model and oak. Leave it on? A spuce or hemlock.
Once I have it to size (maybe I lop off the bottom of the trunk to get something shorter), I spray the upper section of the thing (the seed heads) with adhesive (my current fave is Gorilla Glue Spray Adhesive) and then dip the side in some prepared trays of leaf flock material. The leaf flock trays are actually mixtures of different colors of leaf so that the leaves on each tree have some variance in color. I have a deep green, a medium green, a light green and a blue. I roll the tree around in the tray and hand drop additional flock on the tree until I'm satisfied.
I then dunk the bottom of the trunk in wood glue, take a screwdriver of the same approximate diameter as the base of the trunk and poke a hole through the scenery and then jam the trunk into the hole. Easy peasy... tree installed.
For forests, the trees get wedged pretty tightly together. In towns, I'm more selective about location and I spread them out - just as you would as a property owner.
See? no magic necessary....
Once I'm through installing my puffball trees and I'm ready to attack the detail and/or foreground trees, I take a bit of time to generate the ground cover into which I'll mount my trees. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to install trees on a surface that doesn't look realistic. The handiest thing I've found for overall leafiness on the forest floor is a bunch of discarded scenic remnants that I can "green and brown stuff". I have a plastic bin of this stuff that is generated when I get the vacuum out or I clear off my desk from a scenery project. Ground foam, sawdust, pieces of pyramidal hydrangea, sedum, folidage clusters, and probably the most important item - coffee grounds. Heck, if you wanted to dry out your leftovers from your morning coffee, those would work, but I don't drink much coffee at home, so I bought a pound of cheap decaf that works just fine when I need to add to the green and brown stuff. The coffee grounds are just right for simulating deep forest dirt, which is loamy, rich and dark. Leaves will dry out on top of it and so lighter brown stuff looks realistic when applied on top of the coffee. Most of my forested areas also have a significant amount of understory and near the edge of the track, brambles and weeds. Foliage clumps and moss clumps in a variety of shades of brown and green do the trick. The ground covers get secured with a solid base coat of wood glue and additions can be attached with a some regular strength white glue followed by a diluted white glue solution.
Detail trees. I've built these in a number of ways with varying success. My first attempts were done with painted metal armatures draped with ground foam impregnated polyfil. I think it was a set of 10 trees, but the expense..... Had to be a more cost effective way.... I dug around my property for dried shrubbery in the fall - sedum, azalea, spirea. That made decent armatures that were draped with painted polyfil mat with some additional ground foam on top. From a decent distance? Not bad. Close up? Not really what I was shooting for.
I was out for a walk in the neighborhood with my wife in the early spring and noticed my neighbor's hydrangea seed heads. They are horticulturists at heart and have invested some decent money into non-standard shrubs and trees. Most hydrangeas have very round flower heads, but my neighbor's were pyramidal in shape and the flower petals in the spring had mostly all fallen off, resulting in a brown pryramid of branchy growth. I asked whether I could lop some off, and they were only more than happy to have me prune their shrubs. I got two very large garbage bags and I'm still working on exhausting the 2nd. The more formal name for these is a panicle hydrangea and they are reportedly very easy to grow:
Panicle Hydrangea: The Easiest Hydrangea to Grow - Birds and Blooms
Once I pull them out of the bag, I decide how big a tree and what type of tree I want to model. Since they are pyramidal, if I lop the top off of the seed head, I can easily model and oak. Leave it on? A spuce or hemlock.
Once I have it to size (maybe I lop off the bottom of the trunk to get something shorter), I spray the upper section of the thing (the seed heads) with adhesive (my current fave is Gorilla Glue Spray Adhesive) and then dip the side in some prepared trays of leaf flock material. The leaf flock trays are actually mixtures of different colors of leaf so that the leaves on each tree have some variance in color. I have a deep green, a medium green, a light green and a blue. I roll the tree around in the tray and hand drop additional flock on the tree until I'm satisfied.
I then dunk the bottom of the trunk in wood glue, take a screwdriver of the same approximate diameter as the base of the trunk and poke a hole through the scenery and then jam the trunk into the hole. Easy peasy... tree installed.
For forests, the trees get wedged pretty tightly together. In towns, I'm more selective about location and I spread them out - just as you would as a property owner.
See? no magic necessary....
Check out my "Rainbows in the Gorge" website: http://morristhemoosetm.wixsite.com/rainbows