I was wasting time on You Tube earlier and came across this guy who goes by the name of the Kamloopian. He has a bunch of great videos showing how to scratch build all kinds of things for dioramas. He covers everything you'd ever want to know from making trees to water effects, grasses, LED lights and more. He also saw videos where he gives an overview of various products without promoting any brand names. He's a bit different, but his videos are to the point, easy to follow, and he does some first rate work.

Here's a link to his How to Make Trees Part 1 video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NalhUuQWwG8&feature=related

Watch all the parts to this tree construction. It's pretty amazing! Thit will at least provide you with a chance to check him out. I think his instructional videos will be quite helpful.

Working link just to click on

Thanks Brian. Sometimes when I have pasted in links they come up so they can be clicked on without me doing anything to them, sometimes they don't.

Someday I'll figure out why!

I figured it out. I still don't know why it sometimes does it on its own and sometimes not.

I know exactly what you mean... its most likely problems with spaces and stuff. But I've never had a problem with links just "working" on their own, don't know whats going on there...

At any rate no problem...

Great find though, his voice does get monotonous at times... but worth it for sticking it out.

Cheers!

I figured out I needed to put "url" in brackets before the address and a "/url" in brackets after the address with no spaces between the address and the brackets. Leave off the quotation marks I used, too! For some reason when I'd copy and paste some web site addresses from the address bar to the reply or post, this was done automatically. Regardless, now that i know i will know what to do from now on!

I watched all 5 segments of his tree making videos. Wow! The man knows his stuff! Withing a few videos he mentioned so much that instantly clicked with me. Like thatching for roofs and i think Viet Nam dios. Palm trees, WWII Pacific and Viet Nam, Conifers, WWII Europe, swampy terrain, rocky terrain, making grass out of that fake fur, and on and on! Did you catch one where he made rocky terrain complete with boulders? He did this by placing tiny drops and dollops of that spray foam insulation on a board, When it expanded it made a heck of a convincing (after painting) boulder pile and rock strewn surface. The first one I watched he went through all the various water effect products on the market and showed what results he had gotten from each including the difficulties he had with some. I must have watched 25 videos in all. The last one was he was doing a battle damaged house that looked like he totally scratch built it from Styrofoam. He definitely is quite a find!

As to him, I get a kick out of him! he definitely talks in a stream of consciousness way! But, most extremely creative people I have met over the course of my life have been somewhat eccentric, so I can forgive that in him. Of course, having grown up in the late 60s and early 70s, and was a young man in the 80s, I suspect occasional casual use of a combustible organic substance with intoxicating properties when properly ingested, prepared by careful curing and manicuring, encapsulated in an thin paper membrane formed into a narrow cylindrical shape, ignited on one end, and the by product of said combustion process being taken into the lungs by inhaling for purposes of trendy recreational amusement and distortion of the space/time continuum the result of which is a state of relaxation and a general feeling of well being. Whew!