The set of trees I bought a while ago are okay looking but fairly uniform in size and shape, and I’d planned for a while to try making some of my own. I picked up some tree armatures and clump flock early on in my crafting journey and not really used them.
So lately, I’ve been working on making some more using a few different methods, most of them derived from videos on the Luke’s APS YouTube channel. However, none of the many videos I’ve seen on making trees talks about how much time you spend picking up the fallen foliage off the table and trying to manually glue it back into place!
Basic Materials
Woodland Scenics makes a lot of landscaping products geared mostly toward model train layouts, but their products are also useful for the gaming table. I started with some of their pine armatures and later picked up a bag of deciduous armatures as well, and so far have only used a few of each. The idea is to twist these armatures to the branches point in random-ish directions so the positions of the actual foliage clumps will look natural. In practice I found it difficult to manipulate the deciduous ones to not leave large open spaces near the bottom. They were too thick near the lower branches to easily twist, and I was afraid of causing damage if I gripped them with pliers to twist them.
The clump foliage I used was from WS as well, in a few different varieties, though I plan to make my own in the future. I also ended up ordering some of their Hob-E-Tac adhesive after struggling to get other adhesives to work with some of my more complex trees.
For the armature-based trees, I hot-started by hot-gluing the plastic bases to washers, then hot-gluing the trees into their bases.
I mixed up a slurry of sand, PVA glue, and spackle, then slathered it around the lower trunks of the trees to add a little thickness and texture to the areas that wouldn’t be covered by foliage.
Even though I planned to glue some seafoam to some of them and spray paint the whole assembly, I made the mistake of painting and flocking the trunks and bases before doing so. This just meant that I had to cover over parts of the trees later before spraying the seafoam-laden versions. The photo below shows some WS armature based trees and some custom ones (more on those later) in progress.
These were hit with grey spray primer, topped with a light coat of brown spray paint, and dry-brushed with layers of tan and white. From here they were given a brown was and a black wash, and their bases were coated with grout-and-soil ground cover and some grass.
The Simple Dip
The tree-making method recommended by Woodland Scenics is to coat an armature with Hob-E-Tac, give it thirty minutes or so to set, and dip ’em in the clump foliage.
I made a couple of trees this way, but found them to not be very thick or full looking. They’ll get some use and I might make a few more this way – pines in particular – but I wanted some more interesting ones.
Seafoam – not foam and not from the sea
Seafoam is a Norwegian plant that’s used by diorama makers the world over to make realistic trees. It’s delivered in a box containing a tangled mass of twigs which have to be pulled apart and sorted by size. Then it’s a simple matter of gluing them to the armatures with super glue, like Luke does in this video:
Well, it’s a simple matter for Luke. But for me, it was a struggle to get the branches to stay stuck to the tree long enough for the glue to dry without also getting stuck to me, even though I tried the trick of pre-coating my fingertips with some of the glue and letting it dry. When they didn’t stick to me, they’d simply fall off half the time. It took me almost two hours to prep a single tree this way.
So I switched to Hob-E-Tac, which was better, but still didn’t adhere as well as I’d hoped. I would attach some twigs to the branches, they’d seem to be firmly enough in place to stay adhered, and I’d come back an hour later to find them hanging vertically. Eventually I got through the process, learning to use shorter stalks on the foam pieces and just let them adhere across multiple armature branches.
I also completely forgot to take pictures through this process. Luckily, I’m prepping a few more trees to be decorated with autumn foliage I’ve yet to make, and I remembered to take a shot of those at the “seafoam added” stage.
I spray-painted the seafoam with the same grey and brown combination I’d used on the trunks. After it dried, I coated the foam with spray adhesive and, rather than dipping it, coated it with foliage by dropping the clumps onto it from above.
This worked out well until I decided a day or two later to spray on a water-and-PVA mix to help strengthen and preserve the foliage. Not only did this apparently re-activate and weaken the spray glue, it added water weight to the clumps… so a bunch of them fell off.
A few days later, having let them dry out and done some re-gluing, I tried a coat of some matte varnish instead. This worked better, but something about the way it soaked into the foliage made it seem like there was a slight residue around some of the clumps that muted the colors a little. When I look at them now I’m not sure if it’s still there or it’s just my imagination.
Wiring them up
Besides the pre-made armatures, I wanted to shape a few trees of my own – larger and in more varied shape than the mass-produced products would achieve. This meant getting a roll of cheap plant wire and twisting sections of it into tree-ish shapes. I’ve seen this process done with just the wires, but I wanted thick, sturdy trunks, so I once again turned to the Luke’s APS method of wrapping the wire around wood dowels:
One of mine, I decided, would feature a split trunk, and one would be vary large and thick. I wired up some dowels in a tree-esque kind of way and glued some washers to round pieces of wood to serve as bases.
Next came a hot-glue-fest, first to attach the trees to their bases, then to shape and flesh out the trunks and cover the branches to strengthen and protect them. At this point they looked like something that went horribly wrong at the sex toy factory.
I thought they’d look too smooth if painted in this state, so I used some more of the glue-sand-spackle slurry around these.
Once this dried it looked a little too lumpy and jagged, so I smoothed the pointiest bits with sandpaper and used something pointy to scratch some lines in the surface. From here they were painted and flocked the same way as the others.
More experiments
I also tried gluing some dollar-store moss sheets around a pair of the armatures, spray-gluing, and sprinkling grass flock on them. These didn’t look nearly as nice at the more complex builds, but they literally took just a few minutes of effort to complete.
The results
My wife has dubbed the big one “The Party Tree” after the one in Hobbiton in The Lord of the Rings. She decided to play around with tweaking one of the photos of it a little in a paint program; see if you can tell which parts she modified:
