BRANCHING OUT

OK, today I'll show you how I make my trees.  First off, I don't make them entirely from scratch.  I cheat (slightly) in that I use pre-formed armatures from one of the woodland scenics bush/tree kits, for example (http://www.antenocitisworkshop.com/3-7-med-green-decid-trees-6-kt.html) .  In these kits, you get some clump scatter, some fine detail branches, and a load of these things:

These are the plastic armatures that you can make the trees from.  Each of these little things is only an inch or two high, so to make a proper tree at Games Workshop scale, you need to fasten them together.  The tree trunk I'm using here is a length of plastic cut from a fake flower, but you can use anything that is straightish and about the thickness of a pencil.  In fact you could use a pencil.  (Since building this tree I've bought some plastic-coated wire (like very thin coat hanger wire) which I'm going to try out at some stage)

The first thing I needed to do was attach the plastic woodland scenic armatures onto the trunk.  This was a little trickier than I anticipated.  I cut off the ends of the armatures at an angle and superglued them onto the trunk, using sticky tape to hold them in place. I wrapped a few layers of sticky tape around the joins to build them up a bit.

I found that working up from the bottom with the largest branches, and alternating the position of the branches left and right on either side of the trunk made for more realistic looking branch distribution.

Then I used this stuff called flexi-bark texturing paste, which is best described as pva glue with sand in it, but it sets 'thick' a little bit like plaster.  I'm not sure exactly what goes into it, but I buy it in a pot from antenociti. (http://www.antenocitisworkshop.com/green-scene-flexi-bark-tub.html).  You paint it all over the tree and it thickens up the branches and trunk, and gives a rough textured appearance.

Next I built the base.  The base is just a square of hardboard, and I pressed the bottom of the trunk into a blob of air drying clay.  I built up the air drying clay into a root system, and sculpted out some roots until I thought it looked cool.  Then once it was dry I layered on a bit more flexi-bark to blend the trunk into the base, and it looked like this:

The great thing about flexi bark is you can (to a limited degree) bend the plastic armatures into new positions  to make a good looking tree shape.  Once the branches were arranged, then I basecoated the whole thing in (you guessed it) burnt umber, and drybrushed with a sand colour to highlight all the nice texture in the bark.

basecoated

drybrushed

Then I flocked the base.  This is just the same process as previous flocking exercises I've detailed.  I paint on pva glue where I wanted the flocking to go:

Then scatter on the flocking.  This is a mainly dark brown /green scatter to resemble forest undergrowth.

I glued on a few extra bits of detailing (an old fallen branch, some patches of silflor grass clumps) and then moved onto flocking the branches.

Here it is all flocked.  This is the clump scatter that came with the woodland scenics tree kit, but you can buy clump scatter on its own too.  Rather than pva, I used scattergrip glue for the branch clumps - it stays tacky even when it's dried out, so it's much better at gripping this kind of flocking onto branches.  You paint it on the same with a brush, but you leave it for 5 minutes or so to go tacky before you start pressing on the clumps of scatter.

I've only done 3 trees (this was the second) so I'm still improving.  This one has a few too many gaps in the foliage for my liking.  I now try to get more branch armatures onto them.  Once I've had a go at building a tree truly from scratch (using bent wire instread of pre-formed plastic branch armatures) I'll post again so you can see how I got on.  Here's tree three, photographed outdoors for more natural lighting:

This was made using exactly the same process, except I used a piece of 10mm styrofoam for the base, rather than hardboard.