a way to make trees

[cfesmire]

Just about everywhere I've lived I've seen this type of lichen called Old Man's Beard growing on the side of certain trees.



By pulling small pieces from the tufts of it, one can come up with a small tree or bush just by spraying it a dark color and dipping it in Woodland Scenics ground foam while still wet. But I wanted a bigger tree. So I took a bamboo skewer like one would use for shish-ka-bob and drilled holes in it about 1 1/2" from the pointed end.



I then took the small "branches" that I pulled from the Old Man's Beard and twisted the end between two fingers to fit the drilled holes and dipped them in brown wood glue and filled all the holes to give me the armature below. Just trimmed and painted this would make a good dead tree for a swamp scene.



Then I sprayed it with dark brown and while still wet, sprinkled sifted ground foam in two colors on the armature to give me this.



I wasn't too happy with the results so I used a pair of scissors and thinned out the branches to give the tree a more random look and finally came up with something I was aiming for. The whole process took about 20 minutes but now that I have one under my belt, I believe I could probably cut that time down.



Thanks for looking!

[skunk]

Looks very lifelike. How do you think this will hold up to the ravages of time?

[BillC]

They look great, Chester!

For those who don't have this type of lichen handy, you can go to craft stores and find dried caspia, which looks like evergreen branches. Then follow the same procedures Chester showed above. It's time-consuming but it produces great-looking trees.

[cfesmire]

Thanks guys. Skunk, I dried this stuff before using it to make the tree. You'll notice it turns white from it's original light green color when first picked. I actually gave it a pretty good workout when trimming it and it seems pretty rugged. Thanks for the tip on the caspia Bill.