HI John and MIchael,
sorry for the delay in replying. unfortunately I have had a bit of a relapse with my long Covid and the work I was hoping to put in on the trees just has not materialised this week. I should have been a dozen trees up by now and instead the tree building has come to a halt.
This morning however, I have at last had a chance to have a look at the video post John. I likewise thought it excellent and has a number of techniques for the production of spruce or perhaps Scotts pine, (although Scotts Pine is far from straight), that can be adapted. Some excellent ideas - the Americans are very good at this sort of thing.
There are basically two methods of construction his way is to produce something generic and as the design moves on he adds a bit more character towards the end of construction. I work the opposite way and concentrate on the structure of the type of tree and build in as much character at that stage as possible and continue to model in this vein.
His method which is very effective, uses wire loop construction and long fibres to create the finer structures - very neat and suitable for"leaf materials" such as he uses. I also use fine wire on the ends of branches, but I use Woodland Scenic s foliage material teased out and leave the wire ends to go through the foliage and fold the wire ends over to secure. Once done then I spray photo mount and add finer leaf material and colour using an airbrush, often on the layout.
For the trunk he uses wire and bends the wire to shape more towards the end than the beginning. With my own technique the sculptor within me has always gone for the structure first and in the early days I used, as mentioned, sections of Bowden cable wrapped around by copper wire and dipped in mixed wax, which was fairly quick and gave a nice gnarled trunk effect before adding lichen and some form of flock. In the early days about 50 years ago, I was quite happy with this and I do have some trees on Dubbieside made this way - so quite long lasting and robust, however over the years I have altered almost all aspects of this construction although I agree with you Michael that it can still produce something worth having despite the sore fingers, I also like your suggestion of using the glue to give pads to the fingers, in these far off days I used to have really good pads due to playing the guitar.
I do have a lot of good source material which I am hoping to be able to put up in the form of PDFs. Most of what there is on the internet shows perfect trees and seldom what trees are really like in woodland conditions. Internet examples are usually as near perfect in form and chosen from parkland where they are well spaced and given the chance and freedom to grow in good conditions. I have examples from all seasons which I will put up here once I get going again.
Unfortunately it may be a week or two before I get back to this thread, so sorry for the false start, but I am more run down that I thought - I really did think I was over the worst of it
- apologies everyone.
Allan
Can you tell us the origins of the sailing ship? I asked the question of one of your operators last time I saw Burntisland a couple of years ago, and they thought it was an adapted plastic kit but the gent who built it was not available to confirm. Very hard to find convincing ship kits in our anachronistic scale!
