Scenery: Messing around with Trees

Hello There! Well after moving house, with all the packing and unpacking that entails. The DIY around the house and the building work required to make the place habitable, I have now 'returned'!

With a new log cabin on the was, the base built and the chance of a wargames room, I have started to make some trees for my own scenery.

I have a large number from my business, but wanted to have something more realistic for my needs.

I went to You Tube and glanced through some of the posts there, especially in the model railway hobby. I can across this person, here.

I was aware of the use of seafoam foliage for making trees but not had great results so I felt I needed some better instruction from You Tube and this person had a number of good ideas.

All the following use Woodland Scenics armatures for the start of the model and have Miliputt covering the trunk and a scoring but either dental tools or a craft knife to represent tree bark.

These first ones use seafoam glued to the ends of the armatures after the seafoam has been stripped of the remaining seeds and seed pods which are usually still on the original plant.

The foliage was a little different because my partner mentioned she had a large amount of herbs which were out of date, so I thought I must be able to put them to good use.

Another visit to You Tube and I found a suitable post here, I have followed the Terrain Tutor for a while and used some of the methods he has used in the past. I would highly recommend looking through his channel.

So with the herbs, in this case basil, soaked in glycerine and water mix and then drained through a tea strainer and dried over time and a short while under a warn grill, (don't leave it or forget about it!), you have a new flock and scatter material.

Once the leave have been glued on and dried I high lighted some leaves with a number of bright green shades from the Vallejo VMC range, using a brush.

As you can see they have come out very well indeed and unlike my previous trees you can see through them, much more like the real thing. This item has the basil leaves with a fine covering of fine burnt turf from Woodland Scenics

The next examples are using clump foliage, (far right and far left), and some fine Woodland Scenics scatter on the middle example, again with the seafoam. This picture gives a good comparison of the effects from each method.

Again you can see that it is possible to see through the branches and looks a lot more realistic than my previous efforts.

This item has had a darker fine flock. I visited the local railway model shop here, well not so local now that I have moved, (but I want to make sure I support them), and bought some different shades of flock from a different company, this time 'BUSCH' It was a little too coarse for my needs so I purloined a small blender, (which was no longer needed for food processing!), and blitzed what I had for a while to get a finer flock, which worked very well.

Next up, seafoam again but this time I used various fine and coarse turf from the Woodland Scenics range again. I experimented with the coarse and then fine scatter on each tree, with different variations of colour. 

Here I decided to go far less heavy with the flock, hoping to have a tree at the start of Spring as the foliage is just starting to appear. 

This has the seafoam again but some burnt grass coarse then fine flock.

Lastly some rubberised horse hair which was teased out a lot to provide a less dense canopy. I used hairspray then matt varnish to hold it all together. I tried tacky glue but it was very thick and formed clumps which held far too much flock and made teasing the horse hair apart pointless.

Overall it was very refreshing to do something different and to make some time to use You Tube as a research tool then try to replicate some of the methods on there.

The wargaming hobby has so many facets for the individual to explore and I enjoyed exploring this particular area.

While some may say that these may be too fragile for wargaming, which to a point is true, these will not be travelling anywhere in the back of a car, or to the local club, but I have used multiple sprays of hair spray and varnish to help keep the flock on them.