I have always liked super detailing locomotives and rolling stock and never was much into doing scenery. Working on my own layout now and adding hundreds of trees to a former desert layout has finally got me into doing scenery. One source of my trees is Super Trees. It’s somewhat time consuming to separate out the best candidates, pick out the thin leaves and unconnected branches and then strengthen the trunks where necessary with super glue. After doing that I mixed a batch of acrylic paint to a gray-green color and airbrushed the armatures. The next day I sprayed the armatures with cheap hair spray and dipped the armatures in a mixture of various shades of loose foliage and turf. Here are the results.
Hi Bob! Been “watching” you progress for a while now and you are doing a very nice job! I’ve been delving into my case of 300 or more super trees as well. Trying to straighten trunks is the most challenging part of the process in my opinion. I’ve use 2 methods so far both with about the same result. I’ve boiled them in a pot for about 20 minutes, cooled and dried, then dipped in diluted matte medium to seal them. Then hung upside down on a clothesline with weights clipped to the tips. I’ve also just soaked them in the matte for 20 minutes or more and then hung upside down the same way as before. No matter what, some of the trunks will not straighten at all. The company suggests breaking the trunk in these cases and re-aligning them while affixing with super glue. I seem to have the case that 2 out of 3 will not straighten enough so that part can be frustrating at times. I also found out that you need a TON of foliage and at about 10 bucks a container can get rather pricey. But as you have shown, the end result can certainly be worth it!
Matt, after 20 minutes of boiling the SuperTree armatures should really be very supple and…with the exception of those with exceptionally thick trunks…should be easy to permanently straighten. Are you clipping on enough weights to the inverted tips of the trees to fully straighten them out when you are hanging them up to dry? I’ve rarely encountered any SuperTree armatures that wouldn’t fully straighten (perhaps 1 in 50?).
With regard to the flocking of the tree armatures, it really shouldn’t take “a ton” of ground foam foliage to do the job on a large number of trees. I can cover a huge number of trees with just a single quart-sized shaker bottle. The mistake most hobbyists make is applying way too much ground foam in making their trees. The lighter and airier they are, the better and more realistic they will look. In the real world one often sees a lot of the tree’s branches and it’s not uncommon to be able to see straight through parts of many trees, as you’ll note in the image below. There, most of the
Something I’ve tried with some success is to run a brass wire the size of HO railings up through the main trunk of the tree. It holds the whole thing together and facilitates the bending to straighten the trunk.
