It turns out that ratios are important

This is a project that got started sometime back in the summer, but for reasons that will become clear, I haven’t quite been able to think of it as “done” just yet, so I’ve delayed posting anything about it. But here in Delaware we’re mostly past the good “drying stuff outside in the sun” season, so the final tweaks I hope to make won’t be able to happen for seven or eight months and I’ve decided not to wait until then.

This project addressed a few items on my “stuff to try list”: making my own clump foliage and acquiring some autumn tree scenery for my tabletop.

I’d watched a number of videos of people making clump foliage out of chopped up furniture padding, notably this one from The Terrain Tutor:

… but I didn’t actually review any of them before starting the project. I was just going to wing it in terms of how much paint, water, and PVA to mix in.

Will it blend?

The first step was to tear up chunks of some old seat cushion foam and toss them into a blender I’d picked up at a local thrift store. The stuff I had on hand was pretty dark, and when I do this again I’ll probably try to scrounge up something in a lighter shade.

Add water….

… put on the cover, and let it chop into chunks as small as you want them.

At this point I though I remembered Mel saying it was OK to leave the spongy mass wet since it would help it to absorb the paint and PVA… so I dumped several iterations of this into buckets without actually wringing them out much at all. This, I believe, was the root of most of my problems.

I started adding cheap acrylic craft paint and PVA glue into my buckets of foam-and-water slurry, mixing them until the colors were well absorbed and distributed. After much stirring I had four different colored piles of very wet shredded spongy material.

Bob Ross painted happy trees, not soggy ones

I piled my clumps onto a dollar-store dish draining pan and sat them outside in the sun for what I assumed would be a few hours of drying time, and went off to work on something else. When I went back out to check on them later, not only were they not dry, but the water had started to run out of them, sapping the paint from the high spots to reveal the gray in my foliage piles and mixing the colors in the low spots. I used paper towels to sop up the excess and ended up letting the whole soggy mess sit in the sun for several days.

At this point they were still damp but no longer dripping. I decided to try to salvage what I had by breaking up the existing wet-but-not-soggy piles and mixing in more paint and PVA.

This effort… kind of worked? It produced non-gray, non-runny results that did in fact dry out and allow me to break them up into small clumps. The clumps, however, had absorbed so much glue and paint in my attempts to correct them that they had become… well… kind of hard, crunchy, and heavy.

They still looked alright, though, so I was determined to try to apply them as autumn foliage to some trees.

Realistic leaf-shedding action

So I did, at last, produce some decent-looking fall trees with my home-made clump foliage, using a spray adhesive on trees made like the others I did a while back.

Unfortunately, due to the weight of the clumps, the spray adhesive didn’t prove strong enough to hold them together well. Clumps would fall off almost any time I moved a tree around. I tried spraying them with PVA-and-water mix in hopes of strengthening the bonds but it didn’t seem to help, and possibly added more weight to the foliage.

So most of my autumn trees currently have large, bare sections, and my attempts to re-glue the fallen clumps back onto them haven’t produced good results either. I’ve used them on my table a bit anyway, but I plan to give them an overhaul in the spring.

The structural bits of the trees are still in good shape underneath, so when warm weather returns I’m going to gently tap most of the current crunchy coating off them and re-apply some freshly, correctly made foliage.