NEXT TOPIC: From the ground up - Realistic conifer trees F-A-S-T!
My favorite technique for making lots of good looking conifer trees fast is to use a variation on the bottle brush tree technique I got from Dennis Brown of Chico, CA. Dennis's techniques are described in great detail in the March 1997 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman. I first learned these techniques directly from Dennis at a PCR convention in 1995.
Another favorite technique of mine for making highly detailed foreground fir trees is the methods used by Pete Vassler of Canyon Creek Scenics ( see
http://www.canyoncreekscenics.com/frm_supplies.htm for a great tree kit with instructions ), however, these trees take more time to build and are best left to the onesy-twosey foreground trees ... not entire forests unless you have lots of time -- or money. I'm sure Pete would be glad to sell you a small fortune in trees if you're so inclined!
Anyhow, back to the Dennis Brown conifer tree technique that I use for my general "conifer forest" tree construction.
Get yourself a variable speed drill, a couple of spring clamps. Take a finishing nail, bend it into a hook shape, and chuck one end of it into the variable speed drill so you can hook onto the central wire of these conifers and give them a good spin with the drill.
Okay, on to making the trees themselves.
Start with electric fence wire (it's soft galvanized steel wire about 16-18 guage or so), bend it into a hairpin U shape, the length of your tree you want to make, plus about 30%. When you twist the wire later, you will lose about 1/3rd of the length, so remember to account for that.
Tree trunk wire shaped like a huge hairpin, with an L bend in the end.
Then take some sisal rope (
http://doityourself.com/store/6431225.htm ), cut it into chunks about 3" long, and separate the rope completely into its smallest hairlike individual strands.
Lay out some half-inch masking tape sticky side up the length of the tree, then distribute the minute sisal rope hair-like strands along the length of the tape. You can get different densities of tree by how many sisal strands you use and how much you clump the strands.
Lay the tape inside the hairpin-shaped wire U, clamp the open end of the U-wire to a table with the spring clamp, hook the loop end of the wire U with the finishing nail hook you chucked into the drill and spin away! In a few moments, this will spin the wire tight and make a real bottle-brush shape.
Clamp the L end to a board and hook the wire hook bit into the other end and spin!
Unclamp the bottle-brush and trim it to a christmas tree like cone shape with scissors. The most natural looking conifers are not perfect, so trim the tree inevenly, snip out spots almost down to the trunk, and so on.
Plant your newly trimmed conifer bottle-brush upright into a strip of styrofoam. I keep making these raw bottle-brush trees until I have 5-10 of them planted into a strip of styrofoam.
From here on out, the steps are nearly identical to the steps used for the deciduous trees.
Spray paint the trunks gray or tan and highlight lightly with flat black.
In order to get the right foliage texture for conifers, when applying the foam, first spray adhesive on the bare bottle-brush tree and sprinkle on dark green coarse ground foam (similar to what is done for the decidious trees).
Trees with their first coat of ground foam ... the coarse ground foam. Lightly sprinkle on fine ground foam next.
However, conifer needles generally are much finer that the broad leaves of decidious trees, so after applying the coarse ground foam, spray the tree again lightly with spray adhesive and sprinkle on fine dark green ground foam.
The coarse ground foam gives the tree body, but the fine ground foam gives it the proper texture contrast to decidious trees.
Spray with craft paint to establish the actual tree color ... for conifers I prefer Design Master Moss green (see:
http://www.afloral.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=535 ).
Instead of using light yellow to highlight the conifers' darker foliage, highlight the conifers with Design Master Basil green (see:
http://www.afloral.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=535 ).
As before, to plant these trees, I use a small sharp awl to poke holes in my soft vermiculite plaster scenery, put a dab of hot glue on the end of the tree trunk and poke it down into the hole.
Dennis actually would take these bottle brush trees and stick them into bare tree trunks so the bottle brush formed the top 1/2 to 1/3 of the tree and leave the bare trunk to form the lower part of the tree. However, I prefer the Canyon Creek Scenics' method for trees with trunks showing because they look much more natural. I use the bottle brush trees for conifers that have foliage going all the way to the ground -- mostly large stands of trees between the tracks and the background.
A finished scene with bottle brush conifers. Notice the foreground conifers with trunks, as per Dennis Brown's technique described above.
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