Making Trees that I can live with

Experimenting with foliage design I have come up with three approaches to cover either broad areas of forest or small crops of trees that would likely be found beside roads and around towns.

Forests

Using Upholstery Foam or Polyurethane Cushioning Foam cut the shape of the area you wish to cover.  Now cut to a height of about 10mm to 15mm (for 6mm scale) don't worry about keeping it neat in fact the rougher the better.  Once this is done using tweezers "pluck" pieces of the foam to remove any straight edges and give some shape to the forest.

Now you have the foam formed its time to colour it so that it no longer looks bright yellow/white.  I use craft paint in water, 1 part paint to 4 parts water(roughly).  I used brown as I was going for a forest edge look, but I am not sure if it works well, comments I have had say it looks better than total green.


Pour the mixed paint into a jar and stuff the foam in, close the lid and shake.  Ring out the foam into the jar and repeat for your other forests or put a lid on to use it again later, layout your now coloured foam on a flat surface to dry.

Once its dry grab some contact adhesive spray, keeping the foam forest side up on newspaper spray the entire surface with glue.  Place the now glued forest foam on a clean sheet of paper and shake flock over the forest canopy and let dry (15-20mins to be sure).  Once it dry, shake off the excess flock and place it back on your spray paper, respray to seal the flock on the forest and let dry again.  Dry brush with yellow or light green will bring out the highlights, I have not in my examples but plan to.

Now your forest is ready to mount on the board.  Using pins which you have used the same craft paint as you used to colour the foam, pin the forest in place, careful not to push the pin in too deep to misshape the foam.

For larger scales or a stand alone forest layout Architects of War have a great guide;
http://architectsofwar.com/Howto/forests.pdf




Trees

Option A:
This process is quick and easy but will take ages to make a forest worth of trees and even longer to mount them on your board.  These trees are not really designed to be permanent and are placed on the board when your ready to play.

Using some of Woodland Scenics Clumped Foliage and some normal dress pins, make sure you get the ones with normal metal pin heads not the plastic bulb ones.

Grab yourself some green craft paint that is similar in colour as the clump foliage you have.  Paint the pin heads and let dry.

Open your clump foliage and find some firm pieces, some will be firm to hard where the rubber has bonded more than others, these pieces make perfect trees.

Pierce the foliage with one of your painted pins in manor that you feel look tree like.  Make sure the pin head is as covered as possible.


Now grab some 50/50 PVA wood glue/water mix and pour some into a small container.  Dip the foliage pin into the glue insuring the glue covers all of the foliage then let the excess drain off.  Stand the pin in a piece of foam to dry.

The foliage is rubber so if your glue is not sticking then you have to much water in your mix.
 

Finish touches would have a bit of dry brush highlights of yellow or lighter green to round off the look.

Option B:
Using Upholstery Foam that has been coloured as above, cut a rough tree shape out.  Cut a slit into the foam approx half way up the tree shape (as if you were chopping the top of the tree off), stick a pin down through the centre of the tree out of the base of the foam (keep it straight as you can as it will make using it easier).

Using PVA glue cover the pin and let the top of half of the foam flip back using the glue to seal it up again.  This will also act as a hard surface to push the pin into your board with.

Let this glue dry, pluck the tress shape gently with tweezers and glue and flock.  Spray with glue again and your down.

Foam Tree

I find this method a long winded way to make trees and the foam never seems to look as real as I can get the Clump Foliage to look, Clump also dries harder and is much less likely to wear out.

Option C:
Pine Trees are easy to make with pipe cleaners, get ones with a decent amount of material on the wire, dont get it too short else you will lose your ability to sculpt it.

Austrian Command Stand with Pine Tree

Cut the cleaner into lengths of about 1 inch.  Now using a lighter or candle, melt back the material on one end, this will form the pin to stick in your board.  Melt it back so that about 1/2 to 2/3 of the material is removed.  Now carefully tapper in the top so to seal in the other end and stop you losing the material over time.

Sample Trees

Using a hair spray or spray glue, coat the material that remains, then dip the tree in flock.  Allow to dry then using metal snips, tapper off the bottom so that its pointed to be able to stick in a base or board.  Due to the broadness that the twisted wire will have I would not used this to stick in a cloth covered board as it will permanently damage the foam.  What I have used this for is character bases for command and other stands.

I prefer this look for miniature stands as the wire pipe cleaner gives it a bit more strength and can take a bit of a knock.


Addition
I have just finished experimenting with wire trees and have come back with mixed results.  I feel the trees are too delicate to be mobile enough for gaming, but they do look as close as you can get to real trees.

Photo below shows on the left, the wire frame of the tree wrapped about a pin to make sticking in foam easier.  This is then shaped to look like a tree, painted with PVA.  Once dry you would paint it tree coloured and then glue on the clump foliage at the end of the branches.  Cover the foliage in PVA and sprinkle flock on.

The third tree was an attempt to use fibrous material purchased at spotlight that I had planned for smoke from gun fire markers.  Hairspray to catch the flock and to hold it.  By and large a massive fail....

Conclusion

I have decided that I will be settling on the following for trees.

These are 3/4" to 2" Armatures (Deciduous), which you can purchase from most model train stores.  I would strongly advise using the woodland scenic Hob-e-tac adhesive as it does the job perfectly.

To add to a little something to them I purchased some rare earth magnets 2.5mm by 2mm and drilled open the base stand with a 2.5mm drill bit.  This makes them easy to transport as well as assisting with my next two projects once completed......