I live out west, where men are men and trees have needles. I’m starting to think about how I’m going to fill up several hillsides with tall conifers. I see some for sale that look okay, but they’re kits, which means the package will include some wadded-up lichen-like material that I’m supposed to make look like their wonderful “floor model”. Then there are some ready-to-roll, as it were, which I might be able to squeeze into my budget, but only if they look stellar. I don’t have a lot of patience for dipping things in vats of crumbly “foliage” (though I’m willing), and conifers don’t look like deciduous trees anyway, so I’m not even sure that would suit.
What are some ways you fellas have grown your forests? As Ross Perot famously said, I’m all ears.
I’m not really talking background masses at this point because my layout will have access all around, so the trees will have to be mostly individual except where there are dense clumps (copses?). And if I could find a product that really looked stand-out, truly looked like a 100-foot Thuja plicata or Pseudotsuga menziesii or Abies amibilis, or a way to make them myself, I would rather do that than buy something that looked like a clump of wool wrapped over a bent wire.
Close-up photos will be appreciated (Wayne? Free ticket for you to go crazy here).
Robert, thanks. The video here shows beautiful conifers, just what I would want (those and even larger ones). But although the narrator talked about having added several of the trees, he didn’t say how he “spun up” 400 of them. I’d love to know more.
One of the videos on his channel deals specifically with making conifers. Another videos for aspens. I think his total for pines is up to about 4000 now; less for aspens.
He has a great layout, and he produces great videos. This is not an endorsement, just an observation.
I’'ve been crazy for years, Matt, and the craziness seems to be increasing as my brain shrivels.
I have only a handful of small conifers on my layout. They’re actually the old Christmas tree decorations that were made using twisted wires and bottle-brush bristles. I got them in a box of junk from a yard sale. I decided that the toy-like appearance needed a little help, and chose to make them into some semblance to cedar trees.
All that was required was an application of hairspray (unscented Finesse, from a pump-type sprayer), followed by a sprinkling of Woodland Scenics ground foam. I think that most of them got at least a couple of applications.
In HO scale, they’re only about 35’ tall, and definitely not pines of any type…
I do have some taller evergreens, about 55’ HO at most, but they’re more like junipers. I don’t recall what plant was used, but it might have been the flowers on goldenrod…
These are more like shrubs (We want a Shrubbery!!! We are the knights who say “Ni!”).
These are thistles of some type…maybe Scottish or Bull thistles …I’m no horticulturist. I call them shrubs. Same procedure, but they’re used here mainly as representing a property line…an orchard is planned for the adjacent property.
You might be able to build your own tall pines, using a combination of soft metal wire and bristles from some sort of brush, preferably
The process looks pretty easy, but if I’m not mistaken, that tree-building session was for an N scale layout.
If you want HO scale trees, I’d guess that the procedure is similar, but perhaps with more (and larger diameter) wire.
I’ll have to trawl through all the available (not members only) videos to see if I can find that one. Another video showed about three seconds of him doing something with a drill and some materials, and shaping the tree, but it was sped up about 8x and it was only a montage, so even when I slowed it down to .25 speed it was still fast and it didn’t clear show the process. If it was in still another photo, I didn’t see it. And yes, I’d make them larger for HO scale.
Wayne, as always, beautiful photos. And the process you describe “sorta” makes an image in my head, but not a super clear one. I’m still not even sure what kind of bristles we’re talking about or how to come by them, or how to lay them on the wire. I need to see it.
I’m not sure if it will work, but I’m including this LINK to the tree-making video that I watched. It was done by the same modeller who shared the video of the long CPR train running through the pine-covered mountainous forest.
Wayne, that’s a good one too, even though it’s in N gauge.
I did manage to find the one he did about tall conifers (at this LINK). That dude is a past master, a tree modeling wizard, a djinn of sylvan miniaturism, a… a… well you get the idea.
I don’t know if I could EVER manage what he did, at least not for a whole mountain, but even he said that. He only does a few that way for showcase areas. In fact he laughed that he would regard it as a punishment if a judge sentenced him to make two thousand of them. (“I’ll serve the time instead.”)
However, having seen the superior quality of those trees, how very realistic they look, it makes me much less inclined to settle for trees that look like clumps of foam.
I’m not there yet, but I can tell I’m going to have a serious talk with my soul come scenery time.
Another idea you might consider especially if you’re looking at taller trees is to look at Christmas. Or, more acurately, an undecorated plastic and metal green Christmas wreath. Each of the “branches” are of sufficent size to make a tree for HO scale. I had started to use this idea for my old layout which had a large hill that would have needed a lot of trees. My new one doesn’t have that need but the idea is still valid. Cut the branches from the wreath, trim the “needles” as needed, spray with a plastic safe paint as desired for color variety, spray with hair spray (or some other clear “glue”, and toss on turf. You can leave as is or add foam as desired. I made a few and I thought they looked pretty good.
The best way I have found is to take dowels and taper one end. Then take spackle and coat the trunk area that will show and the take a bunch of brads bound together and scrape the wet spackel into bark (used a saw blade sometimes for this too). When dry spay the trunk flat black and then dry brush the bark with colors of choise. Next take black furnace filter material and arrange on the trunk. When happy glue the two together. Next apply your choise of glue to the filter material and ground foam it and when dry cheap hair spray it or other way of sealing. This will make trees good enough for most peoples fore ground models but of course you can make even more detailed models a branch at a time but the most detaled I got was adding a few individual branches to the ones I descibed as dead branches. For background trees I used Architrees and that is what I use on my currant layout but their quality is inconsistant and not very good for trees over 6".
I hope I did the right thing by sending that link . . . horse, here’s the water . . . but then you tossed out some old Latin names and I figured you knew what you were getting into. I also have a need for a bunch of conifers. A whole bunch. I have a 17’ by 5’ mountainous peninsula that, at the moment, is pretty much bare rock and I don’t want to cover it with hundreds of store-bought green tapered bottle brushes lined up like cloned soldiers standing guard duty.
I live in the heart of the Intermountain West, in the high desert of Wyoming, where all our trees have needles (with a few scattered beautiful groves of aspen here and there) and all our bushes have thorns and/or stiff scaley leaves. So I know what you’re talking about.
FRRYKid, rrebell, thanks for the wreath idea and the Architrees idea. I’ll follow up on those. And Robert, all good. Thanks for the links. Very helpful. However, I would think my spouting Latin would signal the exact opposite, that I had no clue what I was getting myself into. [dinner]
Every now and then, I’m at a train show and some dealer has a good price on conifers by Grand Central Gems. I pick up a few bags. I don’t have large forests on my layout, so a few here and there look fine. I also spend my model RR time on structures and ground cover, so I prefer my trees ready-to-plant.
I will echo rrebell’s post. He must recall the aggro-tree technique posted by aggrojones (miss him) in 2005, probably some time after the mid-summer. He took cut-out disks of the turquoise natural fiber furnace filters that were being sold widely across N. America by Wally’s, teased apart thinner disks from those, and skewered them on the larger kabob skewers or on thin tapered wooden dowels. I believe Joe Fugate contributed to that discussion and advised using a razor saw to run up and down the side of the ‘armature’ to make it look like bark. He even suggested taking individual strands of the fiber and gluing them into the armature, pre-drilled with a pin-vise-type hand drill, to simulate the bare drooping lower branches found on many conifers.
Then, spray the disks carefully with 3M Product 77 or whatever the number is, sprinkle on some smallish flocking or fine ground foam, then overspray with cheapo hair spray to fix it all in place.
Oh, the armatures had to be stained first…before any disks and sprays.
An example I made in 2006 is the large tree rising from the low ground at right:
Accually my way, at least the bark part wasv all me. The spackle is much easier to get the bark look than trying the same idea in wood and if you scrape too much you just add more spackle.
@Mr Beasley, at my very first swap meet ever, last fall, someone was selling bags of quality trees for cheap, and I took note but didn’t buy them because I was focusing on other things (turnouts, Tortoises, particular locos, etc.). I’ve been to two subsequent swap meets and didn’t see any trees for sale. I’m hoping they’ll come round again.
By all means, let me know what that address is. Worth looking into. And your spackle method seems like a good one to try, though I also think the scraped wood would look pretty good.
@Selector, the example of the large tree you posted looks really good. Thanks. Helpful to see how people’s experiments turned out.
The species you chose for examples get really big as trees go. In HO these trees would be between one to two feet – (80-150 feet) depending on the tree species. Most of the bottle brush/spin the wires into an armature methods wont work. These trees really don’t look like the typical X mas tree shapes common to high elevations in Ca or Colorado either.
You really have a couple of options – one is to buy them – check out Canyon Creek (pricey but nice) the other is to make them. Making these trees is not super difficult but it is time consuming – I speak from experience having made over 100 big trees for my layout.
I would suggest that you search out “Furnace filter” trees on Youtube. There is a great article by Ken Larson in RMC August 2006 and there are several tutorials by Luke Towan on making these types of trees.
You really have a couple of options fro construction - one is to build the armatures of branches by gluing fiber material to a trunk by skewering cutout rings or stars like a shish kabob and then hacking them back into realistic shapes – the other is to individually glue the branches to the trunk and build up the trees that way. I have done both methods and found that while the limb-by-limb method looks great – it is too time consuming to be practical in large numbers.
The other issues with these trees is that there is usually a large portion of the trunk visible at the bottom of the tree – necessitating modeling a convincing tree trunk – the Larson article has some great tips on that.
I could go on but I won’t - I hope I have given you some ideas….To see my work search out “Willoughby Line – TSG videos” to look at the trees on my layout – scroll to midway through the video to Mather.
