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!
http://www.geocities.com/thorshammer73/foam.html
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
[user="P & LE RR"] 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?
http://www.telusplanet.net/public/crowley/easy_trees.htm
kind of...
i make deciduous trees.. so i use larger clumps of the material.. similar to the cotton ball + ground foam method size...
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
Take a Ride on the Reading with the: Reading Company Technical & Historical Society http://www.readingrailroad.org/
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
CNJ831 wrote: 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 forrests 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 forrests on any layout in the pages of model railroading magazines today. The shot of my layout, below, which includes a lot of forrested areas, is done from individual tree amatures and looks like a reasonably believable scene from New England in autumn. CNJ831
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 forrests 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 forrests on any layout in the pages of model railroading magazines today. The shot of my layout, below, which includes a lot of forrested areas, is done from individual tree amatures and looks like a reasonably believable scene from New England in autumn.
I'll say!
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
RFinch wrote: 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!
RFinch wrote: 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?
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 close. With superdetailed locomotives, rolling stock, structures, even vehicles, becoming the norm today, the scenery needs to be highly detailed as well to complete the illusion.
Incidentally, there are several good tutorials on the mass production of Scenic Express SuperTrees on-line and once you get the gist of how to make them, the work moves right along. One could substitute simple weed armatures, in many cases, and still get fairly similar results. Having had the practice on my own layout, I'd bet I could now complete a 10x10 foot fully forested layout in just a weekend.
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,
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?
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?
Here's a link to a scenery clinic on trains.com by Joe Fugate (lots of good stuff in there): http://www.trains.com/trccs/forums/1/412365/ShowPost.aspx#412365
Here's the one on his own site: http://siskiyou-railfan.net/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?1270
Now for places to buy trees........
Here's a link to supertrees: http://www.scenicexpress.com/supertrees.html
Here's Walthers site and the seach page showing trees: http://www.walthers.com/exec/search?quick=tree&quicksrch_butt.x=45&quicksrch_butt.y=6
Here's a search at Caboose Hobbies for trees: http://www.caboosehobbies.com/catalog/search.cfm
I'm sure others will have more.
You might try going to the Scenic Express website at www.scenicexpress.com to get info. on the super trees used by CNJ831 (See above). Perhaps CNJ831 can tell us where he buys his super trees. When I checked the Scenic Express website, they appeared to be out of stock on the tree armatures. I don't know if these trees are sold anywhere other than directly by Scenic Express.
Yes, the tree armatures I employed are the Scenic Express SuperTrees, flocked largely with Scenic Express' autumns shades of ground foam (not WS as I mistakenly first indicated). I purchased both my SuperTrees and the ground foams direct from Scenic Express.
I did my tree work a couple of years ago and at the time there were two or three highly detailed, heavily illustrated, tutorials on-line concerning making such trees with which to refer to. I didn't retain their URLs and a quick search yesterday failed to turn up the original sites I used. I'm sure they are still out there, it will just require a more complete search than I did to locate them. Although I haven't read it through, I expect Joe F's scenery tutorial here probably covers the much same ground in tree making, as his trees look essentially the same as mine and probably were made in the same or a similar manner. I guess that perhaps I really should do some sort of on-line tutorial regarding making autumn trees like mine, as the process of matching and blending the various autumnal hues (at least for eastern or northeastern U.S. locations) is, quite honestly, not exactly straight forward.
Incidentally, Scenic Express' large box of SuperTrees (~$100) will provide armatures for about 350-450 trees of differing sizes, plus shrubs, at a cost of about $.30 a tree when the price of the ground foam is included. This number of trees is enough to scenic most reasonable-sized layouts, like mine. Of course, free-for-the-picking weed armatures certainly could be substituted with at least similar final results and at almost no cost.
CNJ831,
Weed armatures? Is there any prep work I should do with them before flocking them?
By the way...thanks for the two pics. I would love to see more.
Mike/Nightshade