Here's some notes I posted elsewhere with regard to autumn trees... but it includes my way of building trees by unwinding the lattice of thin protecting wire stripped from co-ax and other armoured cables.
Hope it's useful
Are you somewhere where you can go out and look at the foliage and take lots of pics? This isn't a silly question. I'm going to give you my #1 all time answer to everything but high summer and dense pine foliage though...
No matter what angle you look at trees you are looking at three things:-
If we were just looking at foliage why would all the world's major armies spend so much time and money on designing camoflage for hiding under foilage? Why would hunters spend all that money on camoflage (before putting on high visibility orange jackets so thet they don't shoot each other)?
You can get "fall coloured" trees and foliage material from people like Heki. A lot of it is very good as far as it goes. You have to recall that they are making a mass product for a mass market. That may be okay with you. In tht case check out Heki ...and Noch if I recall correctly.
You need to decide whether you want blobs of foliage or trees with foliage. There is a huge difference. I prefer trees with foliage because I think that the time and effort is worth it for the end result. Blobs of foliage are okay for a “broad brush” image/effect. It is also a useful temporary measure to use foliage blobs to get an idea of the finished scene and to look broadly okay while you take time to do the detailed stuff.
Putting in foliage can work left to right, right to left, top to bottom etc. You can have detail at the front and blobs behind. You can highlight specific areas with detail… or do the highlight areas first and the rest later.
The better makers have more than one colour in their trees... but they are usually pretty loud and "just before leaf fall" colours. So the whole thing is pretty much a mass of colour and you will be looking at the colour not the things listed above.
My view on good fall/any time foliage is:-
Most of our models are looked down to and a few are at eye level. So we need to think about that effect when we model trees.
Short of hiring a helicopter looking down from any tall building or bridge will help alter our perspective.
What’s the scene through the trees?
Hope it's useful
Are you somewhere where you can go out and look at the foliage and take lots of pics? This isn't a silly question. I'm going to give you my #1 all time answer to everything but high summer and dense pine foliage though...
No matter what angle you look at trees you are looking at three things:-
- Light passing through the foliage
- what is beyond the foliage
- the foliage
If we were just looking at foliage why would all the world's major armies spend so much time and money on designing camoflage for hiding under foilage? Why would hunters spend all that money on camoflage (before putting on high visibility orange jackets so thet they don't shoot each other)?
You can get "fall coloured" trees and foliage material from people like Heki. A lot of it is very good as far as it goes. You have to recall that they are making a mass product for a mass market. That may be okay with you. In tht case check out Heki ...and Noch if I recall correctly.
You need to decide whether you want blobs of foliage or trees with foliage. There is a huge difference. I prefer trees with foliage because I think that the time and effort is worth it for the end result. Blobs of foliage are okay for a “broad brush” image/effect. It is also a useful temporary measure to use foliage blobs to get an idea of the finished scene and to look broadly okay while you take time to do the detailed stuff.
Putting in foliage can work left to right, right to left, top to bottom etc. You can have detail at the front and blobs behind. You can highlight specific areas with detail… or do the highlight areas first and the rest later.
The better makers have more than one colour in their trees... but they are usually pretty loud and "just before leaf fall" colours. So the whole thing is pretty much a mass of colour and you will be looking at the colour not the things listed above.
My view on good fall/any time foliage is:-
- Get the scene right without the trees.
- Locate the bare trees.
- Put foliage on the trees.
Most of our models are looked down to and a few are at eye level. So we need to think about that effect when we model trees.
Short of hiring a helicopter looking down from any tall building or bridge will help alter our perspective.
What’s the scene through the trees?
- The scene without the trees.
- Mud. Not really meaning to teach basics but… if you want your trees to look like trees and not just act as an overall screen you need to prepare the ground as you would for a bare field. Use whatever system of foam or hard shell you usually use with the usual colours in the ground goop so that any cracking won’t show up as a white/pink/blue line.
- Similarly you need to think about the lay of the land and any features. If a stream comes out of the woods and under the track it can do so suddenly from the edge of a pile of tree blobs or from a scenicked hillside covered in trees where the stream can be seen through the trees. The thing is that this needs planning and preparing way ahead of the trees
- What is beyond the trees? More trees? You might go toward simplified trees; even blobs if it’s deep enough. Buildings? A Fence Line? A ditch and fence line? A road?
- What is under the trees? This will depend on land use (or lack of it) and tree type among other things. At the least this means ground cover… grasses, leaf litter, new leaf fall, trodden paths, brambles, shrubs, bushes, saplings, young trees. Plus anything put there by man such as fences, traps, drainage/ditches, sheds, tarpaulins, whisky stills, hides, junked autos, assorted ruins. AND NOT A SINGLE TREE YET! BUT! The trees will look so much better and with less work/less precision… Because your eyes will be seeing all the other things as well as trees… which is what your brain expects to be doing (because that is what it does in real life) so you can fool it into seeing the trees without looking at them.
- Tree location
- I could drive you nuts with stuff about different species having different patterns of seed fall and predator effect. This only really fully applies to natural forest/woodland that hasn’t been affected by man… doing things like sticking railroads through the land… BUT… the important bit is that generations of trees self-space. That is… young trees cannot compete with established trees within a circle of predator outreach… so all the seeds that fall within the circle don’t get to be trees… they get munched by bugs and stuff. The older trees (up to an age) can defend themselves or survive predation. Then humans come along and decide that they like the look of trees of a type set close together and controlled to height and shape. These may be avenues, scenic features or hedges. They have different visual impacts. Not least… hedges are more blob like because humans choose plants that form dense barriers both to block views and keep animals in or out.
- Having said all that the model may want just “random” trees or trees to do a job. The job may vary from hiding inconvenient bits of the real world (like pipe work) to providing a colourful background for the trains via things like scenic blocks at the end of the modelled baseboard. This cuts back to the last section (“1.”) generally the trees will hide things better if they are combined with other things to kid the eye. A pile of “Trees “ will make most of us modellers look to see what the maker is trying to hide…’cos we’re like that!
- I can’t really say which trees and where… because it is so specific to what is being represented in the model. Look around your subject area… and notice that if there are any rules there will usually be something that breaks them… the question is how much the rule is broken/
- From a modelling point of view it is usually a whole lot easier to at least use some form of “blobbing” first just to get an idea of how many trees and how big they will want to be. Torn up sponges on sticks can do this as well as anything… and they’re a lot cheaper than getting foliage material. Even cardboard cut-out trees or trees drawn on paper and posted on sticks will allow you to work out what you want.
- Don’t forget the human impact. Trees are normally kept back from both roads and rail tracks… but that may be complete clearance (possibly leaving stumps) or just pruning the side of the tree nearest the right of way. When a road or rail line is new this may cause hollows in the face line of the trees where the natural tree spacing has been wrecked. As the scars heal and the route matures the gaps will be in-filled with species that grow fast and/or are not predated as described above. A tree falling or being removed is in fact a woodland floor opportunity… sometimes this new growth is a bigger problem for the MoW crew.
- Foliage. GOT THERE!
- Except for high summer broad leaf and dense pine we spend most of our time looking at a mix of spaces between leaves and leaves. This applies especially when looking up – because that is what we do most of the time – but it is why we’ve only just got to foliage. All that other stuff is always in sight.
- Foliage is held up by branches. AAAAGH! This is why creating blobs is so popular… it avoids all the perceived “extra work”. Question is do you want a layout covered in blobs or with scenic trees?
- You don’t need vast amounts of tree detail… ‘Cos you are fooling the eye with all the other stuff… which is about to include foliage. (YEAH!!!) The tree you will need is the basic skeleton. You can buy these or make your own, (See 4. below)
- I think that a mix of foliage materials is best. What’s in the mix depends on the tree…but… In addition to lichens and scatter material I use acoustic wadding. Acoustic wadding is the fire-resistant, man-made-fibre woolly stuff they pack good quality loudspeakers with to reduce vibrations that aren’t wanted. Most of it is white…BUT… It will take spray paints without becoming a soggy lump… unlike lambs wool or similar materials. You can buy great lumps of the stuff pretty cheaply and simply pull it apart before teasing it out to the density you want. Light passes through it or not depending on both the colour(s) you spray it and how much you tease it out. This means that you can see or hide the main branches as you prefer. You don’t need lesser branches (unless you want them) as the stuff will both hang and stand up as you place it. Lumps of it can also be piled together. Fixing is by spraying a suitable glue lightly.
- I’ve previously heard on this forum that you can get an air filter medium in the USA which can be used in much the same way as the acoustic stuff.
- Painting… just choose your colours and spray very softly / not too close. The colour holds.
- WHAT ID DO NOT KNOW IS HOW LONG TREES MADE THIS WAY WILL LAST. My oldest survivor (of two house moves) is only about 6 years old… but it’s okay. I guess that many layouts don’t last that long.
- Making trees… one idea (works for me).
- Instead of winding armatures of wire from individual strands of wire I get scrap armoured wire/cable of various sizes, peel the armour sleeve from the structure (carefully so as to not cut myself), chop the armour into random lengths and unravel from the ends.
- The lengths need to be a lot longer than the tree will end up tall. This applies the more as a tree gets broader. I’ve only figured it out at random. Early trees tended to finish up either too tall or too short.
- A use for trees that come out wrong is fallen or felled branches and trunks. The really bad ones go in the bottom of a tidied up pile or a MoW Gon load.
- I try to use one end of the tube of armour wires to make roots. These help to fix the tree in the ground goop and look much better. Depending on the tree type not many roots are usually needed. I’ve not tried modelling a mango swamp…
- The other end of the tube I peel back in clusters.
- Probably should have said earlier… When the tube of interwoven wires that makes up the cable armour is free from everything else you can both draw t out to change the thickness/density and insert a core of dowel that will become the fixing post into the ground.
- You can also put one sleeve inside another and several sleeves inside one outer. Provided you have made enough tree to support it lower down you can insert extra bits higher up. Inserted bits are better to be of reducing sizes of material as they go higher in the tree. A really big tree can start with really hefty armour wire from mains supply and end up near the top with the thin stuff out of co-ax aerial cable.
- I tried filling out the flesh of the trees with solder but there is simply too much heat loss to even begin to get anywhere. I suppose that you could try dipping the trunk in molten lead (VERY CAREFULLY) the way that candles are dipped.
- Building the tree flesh up with either a resin type glue or stuff like gap filler works best so far. It’s usually very messy and involves a lot of bad language. The effect is good though.
- The great thing is that the wires start out woven together so I don’t have to persuade them to stay together which has always been the difficult thing in the oast.
- I think that the armoured sheath round some flexible air and hydraulic fluid pipes would also do the job. I knew there was a reason that I was looking at that length of pipe at work yesterday…
