Can some one direct me to a book or artical on an inexpencive way to cover large areas with “forests”
search
“puff ball” trees
“furnace filter” trees
“super” trees
The searches mentioned are a good place to start, depending on what kinds of tree you want.
Cotton or polyester “puff ball trees” work for background hillsides cheap and easily. No need for trunks or branches except maybe a few at teh “edge of the forest” that can be seen. Thatis if you are modelling the east. around here, in the summer, the hills/mountains DO look like “puff balls” for the canopy of hte surrounding trees with a few conifers {pine trees} thrown in for good measure.
Puff ball trees are easy- spray paint a few cotton or pollyester “puff balls” a shade of green you like for trees, or varying shades to give some texture, when dry spray with strong hold hair spray and roll in fine ground foam if you like. Glue to your hillside
FOr furnace filter trees, they look more like conifers. You shred some cheap furnace filter materials and glue to a bamboo skewer and repeat teh basic process above. Plant in a hole drilled intp hard cast scenery or foam and glue.
You can buy all your trees if you wish, but that gets expensive. save those for the spots wher you have only one or two prominent trees, like around a house, or at the edge of the “forest line” where one is likely to see the trunks.
As mentioned go to the right side margin and use the “search our community” feature in the “general discussion” section and you should find LOADS of threads about making puff ball, furnace filter, and super trees.
Good luck! and remember trees in nature are not perfect, so if your learning ones come out that way, go with it anyway!
Most real forests have a variety of trees.
The puffy ones in this picture are from a big bubble-pack of Woodland Scenics trees. They aren’t the best-looking trees available, and other methods beat the price, too, but for spotting a few trees here and there you can’t beat them for ease of use.
The tall, spindly ones are called “seedum.” This is a low shrub plant used in flower gardens. In the fall, I clip the ends off and let them dry a bit. For these, I just sprayed the tops green, and hand-painted the trunks gray. Start some now, assumung you’re northern hemisphere and it’s springtime, and you’ll have a crop for the fall.
There is also on bit of “baby’s breath” in the scene. It’s available from floral shops or craft stores.
Woodland Scenics coarse ground foam adhered with cheap hair spray to WS green polyfiber stretched over dead blooms cut from a shrub in the front yard. Cost is pennies per tree, at most. Get them going assembly line-style, you can produce several in an evening.
Jim
If improperly done puff ball trees can look like puff balls of cotton…
There’s gotta be a better method.
True, but not necessarily. The trees in the background of this photo are puffballs.
And my puffball trees really aren’t even very good
I tried a variation of puffballs and lichen to break up the uniformity. Not spectacular, but I thought it turned out okay:
Supertrees look far better alone or in clumps:
I am currently using puffball trees and like the look. However, for a huge area to cover I have seen a variation that could prove useful. In “Great Model Railroads 1998” one of the articles included a bit on using polyester batting. They did not tear it up and make puffballs, as some do, but left it whole and just teased the trees up, painted and added ground foam. I haven’t tried it, but a foot of batting and a little paint and foam would give you an idea what it would look like.
Good luck,
Richard
While Dave Frary’s The Pennsy Middle Division in HO Scale is out of print – it is available as a $5.95 PDF-download at Dave Frary - Model Railroad Scenery website.
Puff ball tree scenery techniques were used to simulate central Pennsylvania’s forests.