Birch grove

Last week I spent some time finishing off the three birch trees that have been languishing on my workbench. 

I discussed armature construction in a previous post, but once that was completed I was a bit puzzled on how to finish them. After trying a few things, and discarding some bad ideas, I finally settled on this approach:

1. Each armature had two coats of white glue painted on to help hold the branches and limbs in place. The nice thing about white glue is the armatures are still fairly flexible when dry, so more adjusting can be done if necessary.

2. A piece of grey duct tape was cut into 2mm wide strips, and these strips were wound over the trunks and major limbs. I made sure the strips didn't overlap, but left no gaps. Once applied I made sure the strips were fully stuck in place.

3. The taped armatures were then painted with two coats of white acrylic paint. 

4. The end branches were loosely painted with brown and grey acrylic paints.

5. The birches' distinctive black trunk slashes and bruises were then painted on with flat black acrylic paint.

6. When the trunks were dry they were painted with loose washes of Tamiya X-19 Smoke acrylic paint.

7. Stringy tufts were teased from a piece of Woodland Scenics Green Poly Fiber for the foliage bulk. These tufts were slid onto the branch ends and then fluffed out. The poly fiber tufts on the rightmost tree are way too dense and had to be thinned out - more on this further down in this post.

8. I then sifted out some fine material from a bag of Scenic Express's Summer Lawn Flock & Turf. The tufts were soaked with Mod Podge Ultra Matte spray, and the fine flocking was lightly sprinkled on. The key word is lightly. Unfortunately I got a bit of flocking on some trunk sections and I need to take a little more time to remove it - it looks like some weird moss.

9. When completely dry the leaf canopies were trimmed with scissors to get rid of stray strands and clumps.

I thought the resulting trees didn't look too bad, but the one on the right was still weird. I didn't want to discard it, so eventually I did two modifications:

1. I pulled the poly fiber off and discarded about 3/4 of it. What was left I teased out into something more stringy and see-through before reinstalling. And ....

... 2) I cut off most of the trunk so that the tree was now one of those examples you see that have a short main trunk where two trunks branch off. 

You hear of film on the cutting room floor, well there's a trunk on the workshop floor :-)

There's the modified tree. It's still a bit odd, especially the canopy, which got a little more fluffing and trimming later, but it's looking much better.

Individually, these birches aren't super detailed, and I still need to work on canopy shaping, but on the layout, placed together in a grove, and photographed in sunlight, I'm quite happy with them. I plan to build maybe two or three more for placement elsewhere on the layout to balance out the composition. Hopefully on those I can work out the canopy and trunk moss issues.