My "raw material" for the first method is dried Sedum
Harvesting time is late autumn, and the trunks look like this:
or when smaller, like this:
Smaller ones can be combined by glueing the trunks together with white glue:
and additional branches can be required. This is easy enough. Choose small twigs and insert a toothpick o.s., then drill a corresponding hole in the general trunk and glue the twig to it.
The trunks are rather brittle so I strongly suggest to keep the bundled trunks together by holding them in a pair of pliers. Once the white glue is dry, I usually cover the "wooden parts" of the tree with a mixture of white glue, water and very fine sand, dyed in order to resemble the real bark:
This mixture dries rock hard. The only thing left to do is cover the sedum with "leaves". Either you choose flocking stuff from Noch, Polák or others, or you take fine foam, it's up to you. Here you see an example where I've used both variants:
And these are the results:
I usually make those trees for wargame tables. Anyway, the tree must be fixed somehow. Small trees/bushes can be inserted in bits of tube (here a drinking straw)
and the straws are imbedded in air drying clay. This can be modelled to represent crude roots.
Just cover the area around the tree with "forest scatter" from the bottom of your material box:
Et voilŕ!
The other method will follow soon:
Questions and comments welcome of course!
Cheers
Romain
