Hello all.
Another project I was finally able to do was a set of autumn/fall trees for general gaming use.
Buying fully modeled trees was simply too cost-prohibitive for me. I wanted to at least ten or twelve stands/bases of trees, so I had to make my own to not go broke doing it!
I decided the cheapest way to do lots of trees was to go for Woodland Scenics tree armatures. Cheap and numerous, great for this kind of project.
However, in looking at other gamers techniques for making autumn trees, as well as source photos of autumn trees in nature, I had a problem.
The one weakness of model tree armatures like these is that they don't have nearly enough of the tiny, little branches that a real tree would have. Therefore, if you just glue clump foliage or flock to the armature, it doesn't look right. You end up with several areas of heavily clumped fall leaves with space in between.
To counter that problem, I hit upon the idea of doing a similar thing I did with Games Workshop's woods model. I used a material to bulk out the actual shape of the tree canopy over the plastic armatures. I used steel wool when doing the GW woods.
This time around, I hit upon the idea of using pillow stuffing/polyfill. Same stuff they use to fill stuffed toy animals.
I took several large clumps of the stuffing, and spray painted them heavily in brown. It can be pulled and shaped easily into any canopy shape.
At that point, you can then glue on clump foliage to the stuffing. You end up with a much more realistically shaped and real-looking tree.
Here you can see my armatures and the spray painted stuffing about to be applied to them. I will post more photos when the project is completed!
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