Someone asked me to post a tutorial on making trees. Since I made a batch tonight, I took a few photos along the way that I'll share. 1. Here's everything I use to make the trees: 3 plastic pans, 3 colors/textures of WS foam, WS poly fiber, 3M Super 77 spray adhesive, and needle nose pliers. The white pan on the left holds tonight's completed batch of trees. 2. I use Woodland Scenics Poly Fiber. It needs some serious unraveling to make it yield as many trees as possible. Pull it apart with your fingers little by little to remove any clusters of parallel fibers. I can usually make about 45 tree balls from one $3 bag of poly fiber. 3. Once I've eliminated (rearranged) all the squiggly parallel fibers, I loosely roll small wads of the fiber into balls. These balls won't retain this shape once sprayed, so don't worry about shaping them now. This picture shows an average size ball that I make. 4. I take all my poly fiber tree balls, foam, adhesive and pans out to the garage for spraying. Tonight, the temperature out there was 22 degrees but that did not adversely affect the results. (It probably accelerated production.) I hold each ball with needle nose pliers while spraying it with a light coat of the 3M Super 77 spray adhesive. I spray downward into a 40 gallon garbage can to catch the overspray.
Making poly fiber trees quickly, Part 2 5. This picture shows the amount of adhesive on the tree ball. I try to stop when I'm getting small droplets. The 3M Super 77 is pretty tacky adhesive, so it doesn't take much to hold the WS foam. 6. While holding the sprayed tree ball with the pliers, I hold it inside my plastic pan of WS foam so I can tumble the foam back and forth over the sprayed ball surface. Because of the accumulating weight of the adhesive and foam, the ball will usually change shape now, becoming more irregular. Voids may open up within the ball, giving the tree more shadow and natural irregularity. For this reason, I don't just release the tree ball to roll freely in the pan. I prefer to hold and rotate it to control how and where I pour the foam. 7. If I want to plant my trees in the same evening, I can spread them out as in this picture and blow fresh air across their surfaces with an electric fan. Once they no longer smell like adhesive solvent, they are ready to go. I clean up my pliers with lacquer thinner. 8. I plant my trees with a hot glue gun. I use WS Foliage Clusters to create underbrush at the edge of any group of trees. This hides the lack of tree trunks and looks amazingly like untrimmed trees. The trees in the picture above have not been planted; they were being dryed with a fan. 9. I have reused several trees after uprooting them from their hot glue 'roots'. I simply trim off the hot glue residue with scissors and reuse the tree. 10. This batch of 45 trees took about two hours to make, start to finish. Cost is around $15. If I pack these trees tightly together, they'll cover 1 to 1.5 square feet. Here's an example of the final product in place. As you can see, I like trees. I don't necessarily enjoy the process of making the trees, but I certainly enjoy the end product. Hopefully, this tutorial helps take the mystery out of making trees for you.
Excellent 'How-To' Todd! They look great on your layout. Would like to see more photos of your layout when you get the chance.
Those trees sure look like the Appalachian Mountains in the USA. It looks like Allan McClelland's Virginian and Ohio. Great tutorial!
Thanks for your kind words, gentlemen! It's a humbling honor to have my scenery compared to McClelland's V&O. I must be doing something right. I 'planted' my trees tonight, so I have just a few more pictures. To get more trees from the batch, I cut some of the tree balls in half with scissors. Once I've stretched the cut halves back into shape after cutting, I have half-depth trees I can use directly against the backdrop. This gives the appearance of greater depth. Once I've planted the trees, I add undergrowth along the front edge of the tree line using Foliage Clusters and hot glue. This fills the gaps between the tree balls and keeps the eye from looking for tree trunks. This photo shows about 2/3 of the trees from last night's batch of trees. It took longer to place the undergrowth than it did to hot glue the trees in place. The trees and undergrowth in this picture took less than 30 minutes to install. For more shots of trees, see my RailImages (linked below).
I saw a tutorial once on making trunks out of soldering braided speaker wire.. this would be a great way to add the foliage to those armatures! Thanks. I'll post the link to the armatures tut. if I can find it again.
Could you add a short trunk or a taller trunk to get a different type tree? Might be worth experimenting. This method is similar to those I have seen where the polyfil is stretched over a tree armature and then covered with foam. This is a much better, effective method for this type of tree, IMHO. Those low growth bushes in front really make the scene!
I like this method--cheap and easy is good, as time and cash is perpetually short. Can this method be used to make conifers?
Crowley's probably getting tired of me refering to his website but I've found his method of making conifers pretty good. http://www3.telus.net/public/crowley/easy_trees.htm This was my first batch. Only about 300 to go... Brian
Great and useful post. I thought I had a lot of trees ready to plant but now I'm not so sure, must experiment with the WS material method, like that. :thumbs_up:
