Added more trees at Ruston

Nothing special to report, just added a few more trees at Ruston. 

Played around with the new camera phone.

Super Tree conservation

Even in a hobby, conservation serves an important role. 

So after working on a batch of Super Trees, do you find yourself with a pile of smaller pieces that are almost too small to make use of but you hate to see go to waste?

Well after pruning my last batch I wound up with a decent pile of small bits and pieces.  First thought was to gather them up and crush them into a useful byproduct for ground cover.   After getting them into that pile, I got an idea!

Why not spray the pile with an adhesive so they hold that shape and then cover them with ground foam?  I think they'd look like thickets?  At least that is pretty much what I've determined Woodland Scenics Briar Patches are made from? 

So I grabbed some hair spray and gave them a heavy coat, and just like hair, it held its shape. 

Then I sprayed them with a coat of Krylon Dark Camo Brown and let it dry.  This increased the hold of the shape.

Next I sprayed a coat of Spray Adhesive and sprinkled on several shades of fine green ground foam and sealed it again with a liberal coat of hair spray and Viola!  Instant thickets!

Who knows, I may not be the first one to do this, but I like it!  Cheap thickets, almost zero waste of the Super Trees and you get a nice looking byproduct.  You can leave it in one big mass as I did, or it can be cut or torn into smaller pieces.

On this day, let us not forget the more than 2,300 U.S. servicemen who lost their lives at Pearl Harbor 83 years ago.

December 7th, 1941

Fuller tree lines

I made more of the thickets and briars and added them to the tree line.

Super Trees are awesome but the only slight drawback to them are the trunks. Even in N scale they can look spindly and malnourished. What I've done in the past is to build up different types of vegetation to help hide the trunks. Which in the wild, rural areas is not uncommon. A stand of trees in the rural areas are not manicured to the extent as they are in urban areas, so the underbrush grows untouched and fills in the tree line. Thus resulting in what looks like a solid mass of trees.

In this wider shot you can see about 4 or 5 different types of undergrowth: The home made thickets, Woodland Scenics clump foliage, several of the bushes with and without the white flowers, bits and pieces of broken off Super Trees that I flocked. Then on top of the static grass, I threw down several colors of course ground foam, followed by several colors of fine ground foam.

Briar Patch and Thickets

I'm always looking for some new variation of vegetation to add to a scene, IMO the more you have, the less your eyes will see a repeating pattern.

On a recent trip to the hobby shop, I came across a product from Woodland Scenics called Briar Patch, which is supposed to resemble thick and or thorny bushes.  I thought this would be a nice addition to the bog scene, so I grabbed a pack of it.  I think it was about $9 each.

After getting it home and inspecting it, it looked like it was made from chunks of Super Trees with ground foam glued to it.  Simple enough.  It was tightly packed and was rather brittle.  While trying to break/cut off a section, it wanted to crumble quite a bit.  My first thought was that I could replicate this fairly easily by using a course furnace filter for much cheaper?

After digging through my scenery supplies I found a package of  Natural Aire filter that I picked up a while back for another project.  This should work nicely?

I cut off a small section to start with.  There's a backing screen that helps hold the filter together, this I removed by simply peeling it off.

I cut the strip into a small block and stretched it out thin then squashed it into a bush like shape and sprayed it with Krylon Dark Camo Brown paint (which was close at hand) so it was brown and not green.

While the paint was still wet, I applied a good coating of some fine burnt green or late summer ground foam to cover the filter fibers and shook off the excess.  Next I sprayed it with a good coat of cheap hair spray and sprinkled on a light amount of some brighter green ground foam for a variance of colors (I do not like a monotone look for vegetation) and shot it again with the hair spray to lock it all in place.

Once dry, I trimmed it up and placed it in the scene up against the base of the tree line.  I'll add some smaller bits and pieces of foam to help add layers to the scene.   

 

Trees of the bog

Today I got the static grass applied to both sides of the track that runs behind the bog so that I could finally start planting some trees against the backdrop.  Wanted to get these in before I started working on the trees that’ll be in the foreground.

Luckily I had enough trees left over from the Whitewater Creek scene to cover  the majority of the area.  With a lot of open spaces between the larger trees, I started filling in with some leftover Super Tree pieces that I removed while planting them.

That still left a lot of open area space at the base so I started making some brambles and will eventually work in some smaller vegetation and some poly fiber bushes to give the tree base a fuller, thicker look.    

The bog continues to green up

A few weeks ago after performing an update on my computer, it gave me the double barrel middle fingers!  Turns out the Bios became corrupt and then I spent another weekend getting up and running again after the repair.

In the meantime, while trying to stave off the withdrawals, I continued to work on the bog adding most of the vegetation around the shoreline.  As of this post, 90% of it is done.  I still have to apply static grass on both sides of the track and start adding trees around as well as some dead trees and rotting stumps in the bog.

I plan to add a small cabin and an old boat dock where there is still bare earth.

    

Bog vegetation

Ok, I went down after all the ghouls and goblins went home tonight and played around with the first little section.

I applied the glue base then placed the dark green tufts around the edges.

Hard to see but I did add some lighter colored tufts towards the middle and rear.

The large white flowered shrub is something I got from Scenic Express made by Martin Welberg. Before adding it I misted it with hairspray and sprinkled on some Woodland Scenics white flowers.

Next I mixed some 4mm dark green and 6mm autumn grass and applied very heavy around the entire area and sucked up the excess.  I then sprinkled on a variety of fine green ground foam and misted it all with more hairspray.

Before it dried, I lightly applied some Woodland Scenics yellow and purple flowers.  Then added some small bits of clump foliage and the Woodland Scenics Tall Grass and misted more hairspray to lock stuff in place.

I'm not sure how deep I'll pour the water, but it should be at least halfway up the edges.  This is just the undergrowth, I plan to add more small shrubs, trees and stumps along with some 12mm tufts to the bog bottom around the edges.

Tufts, tufts and more tufts for the bog

I know I know.....

There've a been a bazillion static grass tuft "How To's" posted over the years, but a friend asked me how I did mine to get them looking full and not chincy looking.  So I took a few pics when a did a batch, hopefully these pics will explain it better.

These tufts happened to be made using a lighter color so I had some color variation.  For these I started with some Silflor 6.5mm Late Summer and Autumn grass. 

Then I mixed it into the hopper, roughly in a 2pt Autumn to 1pt Late Summer mix.

Next I started applying the glue dots to the Non Stick pans.

Next I applied the negative clip to the tray and started shaking the grass onto the dots, and continued until they were fully coated, then I moved the static tool above the grass back and forth keeping it about 1/2" above the dots.  This helped to move the grass some more and keep it standing upright.  

Then I shook the tray so that the excess moved around the dots even more.  After that I turned the tray upside down and tapped the edges slightly to knock off as much grass as I could.  

Then I reapplied the negative clip and repeated the whole process.  After that I laid the trays upside down so that gravity helped to keep the grass from laying down as much as possible.   

This is how they turned out, nice and full!

This is about what 12 trays have made for me so far, and I think I still need more?  If I had to buy this many, I would have had to take out a loan...