On a recent trip to the Dollar Tree Store I came across Evergreen Trees, 2 per pack in the Christmas display. Of course a pack cost $1.00 and according to my calculator that’s 50 cents a piece. That’s what I call cheap. Using a hair dryer you might make them look some what better.
As a loner and a newbe I often don’t know how things look to other modlers as opposed to the unitiated who like most everything or won’t say.
Comments welcome.
Bob
There used to be this green stuff that came on a roll. Kinda like pipecleaner, but with long bristles. I used to use that cut in half for evergreens. Thing is that most of your evergreens were all the same size using this stuff. I keep wanting to call it chenille ir something like that. Last time in a craft store I couldn’t find it. Not sure they make it anymore.
If you want to make them look more realistic, take a pair of scissors and cut off some of the branches so they aren’t so uniform. Then take some cheap heavy duty hair spray and saturate it, then throw it into a bag of Woodland scenics ground turf and shake and roll it around. Remove it from the bag and shake of the excess ground turf and plant it on the layout…chuck
You should want to call it chenille, as it was bumpy chenille (although searching online it doesn’t seem to that popular, a lot of sites use it interchangably with pipe cleaners).
In the craft stores in our area, the bumpy chenille is usually stocked in the same area as the decorative pipe cleaners, e.g., those larger than normal pipe cleaners and in various colors. In several articles, I’ve seen the bumpy chenille used for small background pine trees in a forced perspective application.
Bob
One of our HO scale club members brought some of those trees last year. They are too big for HO scale and don’t look the least bit realistic.
They could probably be cut off at the bottom to make them shorter and used as background trees, but we didn’t use any of them on the club layout.
Go to JoAnn Fabrics to get a sponge rubber sheet. This can be cut into jagged pine tree (triangles), that sprayed green , and hel to the wall with spray adhesive, can be layered to cover a flat wall, or staggered on slopes of a 3-D mountian. Fro background distant trees, they are quite believable. For closeup evergreens, one can add lichens , or half filter circles to cardboard cutouts of strings of assorted sized trees. By layering, one can form a canopy of evergreens on a flat painted hillside. I used Acrylic self painted evergreens and occasional built up semicircle trees formed from furnace filters, for quite a hillside forest of evergreens. Use colored lichens for in between shrubs. Bob Hahn
I’d be currious as to how tall they were as most trees I see advertised for HO are too short to be full grown trees. About two years ago my parents had the last of the pine trees on their property cut down. They were full maturity pine trees about 55-60 years old. The average height of them was 100’. If you were to compare that to something for HO scale you would need to stack two Athearn 50’ gondolas verticaly end to end to get the height comparison. In all of my years of modeling I have only seen one layout that had accuratly sized trees. when viewed from above it did not look right. however, when viewed from track level the realism was incredible. This si something that I am struggling with on my layout right now.
Dan
I’ll try to improve the trees and use them some place. Right now my ground is pretty barren so something is better than nothing.
Thanks for the replies.
Bob
Dan:
I’m with you. I’ve yet to see a commercially available evergreen that’s too LARGE for HO scale. Especially when I’m modeling the California Sierra, where they grow to incredible proportions.
I’ve found that if you’re modeling mountains, the trick is to plant the large, ‘oversized’ evergreens on the lower slope and gradually reduce the height as you work up the mountainside. Forced perspective, but it works.
Tom
Have you tried making furnace filter trees? You can get a bag of trunks from the craft store that will make 50 trees (aprox 50 scale feet high). a cheap furnance filter for (24x24), some brown/grey spray paint, a bag or two of woodland scenic ground foam and a can of spray glue. For about $20.00 you can make 40-50 trees. They look good and can be used for background trees, and some towards the front of the layout. And they are kinda fun to make.
John
Here are some trees I have made from furnace filters.
John:
Agreed. And if you stop off at the grocery store and buy a pack of those bamboo skewers (either 10" or 12") that are 100 to a pack, you can repopulate a National Forest, LOL! I’ve got a flat of furnace filter material, a pack of skewers, and so far I’ve made about 50 trees and still have about 7/8ths of the furnace filter material that I can work with. And yes, they make GREAT background trees. I may run out of layout before I run out of furnace filter material. OR skewers, for that matter! [:P]
Tom [:D]