Well as I watched my dog pulling the batting out of a new dog toy that didn’t last 5 minutes with her I got an idea to attempt to recycle the batting by glueing the stuff to sticks and spraying them with browns and greens.
Now keep in mind it always takes me a few tries to get my scratch built stuff right but I’ll need a before pic for when I get really good at this , here goes.
This is a pic to show the scale of the trees, some are small, medium, large and Xlarge.
It is too bad this next one is a little fuzzy because it looks pretty good in real life.
I still have to carve the roots into the bases and paint the bases to match the tree trunks and ground they will be sitting on.
I had to add counter weight stones on some of the bases for balance and to keep the size of the bases down.
The bases are made of light weight floor patch cement (thats all I had at the time).
Well, I know they are not the greatest but they might not look too bad scattered through out a grove of store bought trees.
It’s a start. [:)] Now you need to find something that will give you some armatures (branches). If you use the same batting, attach it to your tree armatures, spray the batting with Aqua Net, then sprinkle it with some Wooden Scenic turf (comes in light, medium, and dark - also coarse and fine), that will give you some variation in the color and texture of your trees.
After applying the turf, be sure to lightly spray your tree(s) again with Aqua Net or some other cheap hair spray to lock things in place.
Further to what Tom has said, you should try to give the trees a more “airy” look. Use about 1/5 of the amount of fibre you have used and pull it and stretch it until it is very “see-through” before attaching it to the armatures. When you can see the branches inside the tree you’ll have very good looking trees. Hope this is helpful. [:)]
Hey Red Horse, you got the right idea, and great start. Along with the tips from above, check out this link below. This is a thread I started a few months back on making trees on the cheap. My son and I pumped out a whole bunch of them in a short time.
You are on the right path. All of the advice above is good. I made some trees one time by taking some fine wire, (probably 24 gauge or even smaller) cutting it into varying lenghths and made up a bundle of wires with the ends all even on one end of the bundle. Then I started twisting the wires together to form the tree trunk. As I worked “up” the bundle I would separate a few wires out to make a branch off of the main trunk. Make a few branches like that and keep twisting those wires, separating out more of them to make progressively smaller branches until you get the the point where all you have left is one wire sticking out of the last twisted group of wires. That wire is the branch tip. I then took modeling clay and formed it around the trunk and made a bit of a root system near the bottom. One it was dried I carved bark and roots into it and painted the trunk and branches. Some polyfibre painted green with some ground foam applied and they looked pretty good, IMO. Now if you have a forest to make, this is a slow way of doing it but the trees look pretty good. If you can find weeds etc. with an armature already incorporated they can save a bunch of time.
Woweeeee, these are some great links and some great tree making Ideas, thanks so much my MRRing Brothers, very cool ideas indeed, I’m going to try each methiod and mix all these trees and I should have a very green layout when done, I’m off to try the twisted wire ones first…
I have just been given enough 2’ thick white foam board 4’X8’X2" to make an actual topogrphy land scape, with ponds, hills, mountain tunnels , moutain passes and anything else my imagination can come up with…
Huummmm, has anyone ever modeled a working (smoking) Volcano???, Just wondering, I like too let my inner kid run amuck sometimes…LOL!!!
You guys ROCK!!!..
GO Zombies!!!
Jess Red Horse, lover of Zombies and other creepy HO things!
Jess, I think you’re on to something there with the batting. No sooner do I give my bulldog a stuffed animal than I find it all over the house. As for your first try, I won’t even show my first attempt. Talk about plug ugly! As the above good folks suggested, try using only a small amount and see it it’ll streach very thin. That might just do it!
Nice trees for a first try, Jess! A lot better than mine, certainly.[:-^] As well as what others have said, maybe you should airbrush the trees a shade of green with less blue(or is that just my computer?). Keep it up!
I tried to “pull” the fibers or stretch them as suggested , I must have the strangest batting in the country because once I seperate the stuff it don’t want to stick back together unless I roll it into a ball and even then it dont work.
I’ll have to try different type of batting.
Dang those wire trees look real after done.
I worked on another section of my layout and will post some pics after I’m fully awake.
Great stuff by everyone here.
PS. for the guy who was seeing blue trees…you may want to check you color balances , they are green alright…lol!
What I used for trees is called polyfibre I believe. It’s basically pillow stuffing from Walmart. Comes in a big bag and is white. I think if you over-pull the fibre it will be similar to what you have, where it won’t stick together again. You have to carefully pull the balls out into tufts without pulling so much that they come apart.
Yes the wire trees look pretty good. The one in the picture is not the best example though. The trunks look really good once the modeling compound is applied and given texture and paint. As you may notice the branches on that tree are too brown. The color on the main trunk is a bit better with more gray on it.
Looking forward to seeing what you come up with. [tup]
Not a bad start. You need to spray them with some spray glue or cheap hair spray and sprinkle some fine/medium ground foam over them.
Store bought lichen glued onto the trunks and coated with ground foam works good too.
I cant get over how good your wire trees look, BlueHills! [V]I won’t even describe my attempts at it. They’re beyond ugly. By the way, Jess, your right, the blue trees thing was just my computer.[;)]
I can’t take all the credit though. My wife has a fine eye for trees. The best looking ones are usually due to her finishing of the tree. The technique is time consuming but with practice a fairly convincing trunk and branch structure can be acheived I think. The hardest part has to be getting the polyfibre into a shape that when colored and textured with ground foam, models a canopy of leaves and small branches with some degree of realism. As with all scenery. Practice makes perfect.
I’ll never try to make a forest of trees this way but they make a great focal tree once you have the look right. The small wireframe trees are going to be ornametal and/or fruit trees. [:)]
Some of the better looking trees I’m seeing lately are coming from natural weed structures with ground foam, fiber, color, etc. applied to enhance the overall effect. Silverspike has a good thread on the subject I believe…if I find it I’ll post a link here.
These Supertrees are pretty neat too. I’d like to find a bush locally though…?
I’ve seen some decent evergreen trees made with wire & poly rope covered with paint and ground foam. There is the furnace filter tree…that’s one I have yet to try.
In my research I have seen a bunch of ways to make trees. It seems like new ideas are coming along all the time still.
Regardless of the method trees are a challenging part of scenery IMO. [:)]
I happen to be in the midst of turning out about 500 deciduous trees for the Historical Model Railroad in our local Historical Museum. For turning out hundreds of HO scale tree, I have found that using stained half wooden skewers make great trunks, I cut hundreds of circles from cheap furnace filters , that are pulled apart into several layers, and spray them either Hunter’s green or flat black. I lay out about 30 circles (of various sizes) on newspaper, and apply circles of Elmers glue. I then, sprinkle on ground up Busch foliage clumps and pat them down. I then press the circles onto the skewers (that have been pressed into holes drilled into 2"-3" deep scrap Styrofoam ). This keeps the tree snuggly upright and makes the first layer of foliage start part way up on the trunk. Since the trees will be rearranged, and replaced with Summer or Fall colored foliage, I find it best to use ovals or rectangles of old ceiling tiles (that are tapered at the edges and stained) These bases are not glued to the layout surface. Stained Kitty Litter or ground up green Florist’s foam, are a cheap alternative to Busch Foliage clumps. ( Which incidentally come in three shaes of green and Fall foliage colors. Bob
Much better than my first trees, uh shrubs on sticks, uh green drumsticks, were! [:)] And don’t worry about people laughing, we all started sometime. I think all the advice given above is good. But I’ll add one thing. Keep one of your first trees as you continue to improve your skills. Next year take it out and compare to your latest one. Bet you’ll be smiling big time
