Hello
I’m modeling the Appalacian Mountains in the fall of 1968. As you probably can already tell, I need a lot of trees. I have a method for creating cheap pine trees but am looking for one to make deciduous trees. Does anyone have a way of making them?
Thanks
Queen of the Praire makes good birch/aspen trees. Spiria makes good maple or small oak. Puff balls of micro fiber makes forests, Some desert southwest weeds make good oak when used with microfiber, spray paint and ground foam. Here is one pic of may fall scene.
Lets talk more about specifics.
Perhaps this would help!
personally i like the toothpick tree method for filling in background hills (which i am sure will have al ot of if you are modeling anything appalachain) … im modeling south of pittsburgh so i have the same thing going on…
so what i do is i take toothpicks, paint them various shades of brownish-gray… poke them into my foam covered backhills, and then put on clumps of WS Clumb Folliage… i use light green, medium green and dark green randomly spread out among my “trees”… i rely heaving on medium green as i am modeling mid-late spring while the trees are rich greens and lush… you can use some of the fall colors that WS makes to help out for your needs… also you can use an occasional lichen with ground foam well coated… the variety makes things look natural as not all trees are the same color even if they are the same kind… i have had success with this and it cuts the cost down by utilizing less clump foliage and not needing as many plastic tree armatures (i use a few along the base of the hill for added realism)…
hope that helps
You mean like this?
kind of…
i make deciduous trees… so i use larger clumps of the material… similar to the cotton ball + ground foam method size…
That’d work!
By all means check out Joe Fugate’s thoughts on individual trees vs. forest canopy. Other than at the edge of open areas, one does not see the individual tree trunks! So one or two trees deep you would only see the canopy, which is mch easier to model. jc5729
Made with ground foam and caspia. http://www.2guyzandsumtrains.com/2g/howto/trees/mt0.html
For large masses of deciduous trees, I use balls of poly fiber covered in ground foam.
From my autumn scene:
From my summer scene:
Remember, in many parts of Appalachia, you can’t see the tree trunks for all the underbrush, even along the right of way, or the water’s edge.
Nick
If believability is among your goals, it is best to make cheap individual deciduous trees from weed armatures covered with varying shades of ground foam. The “puff-ball” method, or similar techniques, of creating forrests in pretty much considered old technology in today’s hobby, where maximum realism and detail is typically desired. Solid-canopy forests of puff-balls only pass muster if they are viewed from a considerable distance and certainly not close-up. You’ll notice that, as a barometer of the techniques currently employed, it is becoming increasingly rare to find puff-ball forests on any layout in the pages of model railroading magazines today. The shot of my layout, below, which includes a lot of forested areas, is done from individual tree armatures and looks like a reasonably believable scene from New England in autumn.
CNJ831
I’ll say! [tup]
(Picks his jaw up off the floor) Ummmmm,…yeah…What he said!
To CNJ831:
This is a beautiful scene (I think I’ve seen it someplace in NE). How long did it take you to make all the trees for this scene and for your other forrested areas? How deep is the scene behind the buildings in your photo? My limited experience is that layouts tend to absorb trees like a black hole. After making several hundred pine trees for a friend’s layout I stopped when it appeared that we were not making any progress in filling the areas requiring trees. If you need to cover relatively large areas with trees, is there a quick alternative to the “puff-ball” method to accomplish this?
Bob
Besides closing your eyes and imagining!
Really not all that much time is required, Bob. I’d make up about 40-50 trees at a clip. This took perhaps an hour or two of actual worktime. My layout has around 450 deciduous trees right now and when I get around to it, it requires about another hundred or so more. The tree armatures are from Scenic Express, covered in WS ground foam. Such deciduous trees fill up quite a bit more space than do pines, so considerably less are needed to make a realistic-looking forest.
In that first scene from my layout, the forest is about a foot deep. Other forested hillside areas on the layout are up to 30 inches deep and 10 feet or so long. The “planting” is what I found really consumed time but, in my case, much of it was done off the layout (several of the forested scenes were actually built outside in my driveway so that I could walk around and work on all four sides of the scene at the same time) with the completed background scenes put in place on the layout only when finished.
In my opinion, the only really convincing way to create any large forested area is with individual, detailed trees. Any other approach, puff-balls, lichen, green-painted and foam-covered styrofoam balls, or anything else may be passable at a distance but rarely looks very good up clo
CNJ831:
Thanks for the information. You do beautiful work. Thanks for sharing another photo of your layout. I’ll try your method for realistic trees when I get to that point in the construction of my new layout. I’ll be modeling areas in the western part of the US so I’ll not need that many trees, but I’ll try your method on the ones I will need. These scenes you’ve shown us from your layout have got to be some of the most realistic model RR scenes that I’ve ever seen. You appear to have done for country scenery what George Sellios has done for urban scenery.
Thanks again,
Bob
To CNJ831:
Do you have the website addresses for the tutorials for the mass production of the Scenic Express Super Trees or are the tutorials found on the Scenic Express website?
Bob
tree questions? I only see wun question. Where are the other too? [:D]
Ok. Here is my other question.
I live a little over a hundered miles from my nearest hobby shop. What web sites could I visit to get the materials needed for the trees?