Ever evolvin dio. ft. 'THE INDESTRUCTIBLE TREE' as ft. on youtube.

[Pig of the Week]

The static grass application thing I've seen done well on peoples model railway layouts, I'd have thought you'd be able to utilise the teqnique on your stuff somehow.. but I've no idea how it works tbh !

[Badder]

19 hours ago, Pig of the Week said:

The static grass application thing I've seen done well on peoples model railway layouts, I'd have thought you'd be able to utilise the teqnique on your stuff somehow.. but I've no idea how it works tbh !

Using a static grass applicator and tin foil leaves worked. 

I made a long deep paper trough to place the tin foil leaves in, ran CA glue along a length of fishing line then held it over the leaves before bringing the applicator sieve over the top. The leaves jumped about and many of those which hit the line stuck in place, in the 'standing' position.

However, a lot of the leaves hit the glue and didn't stick, but then picked up glue, fell back down and stuck to the paper trough. It then got messy and a new trough had to be made.

The next experiment will be to see if I can use the same method to add leaves to a 'clump' of twigs. I think I'll need to use a cone-shaped container to contain the leaves and place the 'clump' inside.

 

Stay tuned.

 

Rearguards,

Badder

 

[Pig of the Week]

Sounds like it has potential then, just a case of experimenting i guess..!

[Badder]

Hi all,

You know me: I bet he changes things yet again. Yes. Lol.

As I continued to build up the tree pictured above, I realised it was all going 'pear shaped', which would have been fine if it were supposed to be a pear tree, but it isn't.

The trunk was way too thick for the height of the tree vs where the boughs and branches were sprouting from. It would have to have been a pollarded tree, which I didn't want. So my first thought was to increase the height in scale with the trunk, and it ended up  2ft tall. Which, whilst not impossible, would seriously restrict any future decision to 'case' the diorama. So, either scrap the trunk, or find some alternative 'silhouette' for the tree.

 

For now, I've plumped on the latter, with a trunk which splits in two at a height of around 5 inches and the tree's total height being around 18 inches.

Unlike the original tree, I'm building this one from the top down, as, being a much larger and 'open' tree, demands that the upper branches and twigs are arranged more realistically. Previously, I'd relied on the foliage to hide a lot of the 'bad' branch structure. All the while then, I've been doing a lot of 'dry-fitting' to check the branches and the tree's silhouette. I'm getting there. I  just have a few of the upper-side branches to sort out. After that things should get MUCH easier, with all of the rest of the branches angling towards the horizontal.

 

When it comes to adding foliage I will give the 'tin-foil and static applicator' a go on a test piece and see if that's viable. If that doesn't work I'm going to go for either a herb or paper-punch leafs scatter. Still intrigued by the 'cone' I am going to try adding scatter to individual bunches of fishing line by encircling them with the cone. I've also had the idea to splay the bunches of fishing line twigs out FULLY by using putty, then adding adhesive, then adding sprinkle. That should stop individual 'twigs' clumping together...............But that's for later.

 

Here's where I'm at right now:

 

 

The twine wrapped around the boughs is just there to hold the two together while the CA cures.

 

TFL

Badder

Edited May 26, 2021 by Badder

[Pig of the Week]

The triffid has got a friend now !

You wonder tho if sometimes its not easier to start from scratch again rather than re using bits that aren't "right" ...through recycling is brilliant of course 👍

Edited May 27, 2021 by Pig of the Week

[Badder]

12 hours ago, Pig of the Week said:

The triffid has got a friend now !

You wonder tho if sometimes its not easier to start from scratch again rather than re using bits that aren't "right" ...through recycling is brilliant of course 👍

Hi Pete,

You're right in that I did wonder. The internal structure of the original tree was just too messy to 'recycle' though. I never intended it to be 'opened up' to view. So the top part of the tree is basically all brand new, except for the odd real branch, one of which has the original fishing line 'twigs' on it. The rest of the real wood, and fishing line 'twigs' are all brand new. Each of the  'twig' bundles contains 26 twigs, each about 1.75 inches in length, =45 inches =1.14 metres. I've made 120 bundles of twigs so far = 136 metres of line! And I've still more twigs to make. The spool contained 230m of line so I should have enough to complete the tree, JUST. 

 

I'm still having issues with the original trunk, sorry, Triffid, and can't yet decide whether to use it and make a very tall tree, or replace it with a thinner one and make a shorter tree. I suspect I'm going to go for the latter. Even in the shorter form, it will still be as tall, or slightly taller than the original.

 

Meanwhile, all of the fishing line from the original tree will be re-used, either to make another tree, or bushes, or both.

 

Rearguards,

Badder

 

 

[Pig of the Week]

Well it's good to see that nothing goes to waste anyway !..👍

[Bullbasket]

I remember when you first started this dio Badder. It was just after my 21st birthday. I'm 75 this year. Excellent work as always. It does remind me of so many properties around here.

 

John.

[Badder]

On 5/28/2021 at 4:20 PM, Bullbasket said:

I remember when you first started this dio Badder. It was just after my 21st birthday. I'm 75 this year. Excellent work as always. It does remind me of so many properties around here.

 

John.

Hi John,

That was a real LOL I gave you BTW.

Thanks for dropping by. I can see what happened.  Seeing the tree being worked on, you must have thought you'd gone back in time.

 

Rearguards,

Badder

[Badder]

 

 

Right. I carried on adding fishing line twigs to the tree until I was happy with the density, and then tackled the thorny issue of the trunk. The two main boughs sprout from the trunk at around 15ft, which is too high, so it would mean having to add branches lower down. Which would be fine IF I could be bothered. Which I couldn't. Instead I decided to decrease the height of the trunk. By binning it and making a new one. Or maybe not.

 

I thought of an alternative which was to have the trunk split in two almost immediately, or that the tree is actually two trees, joined at the hip. I may stick with that idea, or I might just add a very short extension, making the trunk just 8ft tall.

 

Whatever, I had to adjust the angle of the boughs/trunks, with the main one now standing vertical, The other bough was also made more upright, and I filed the touching sides of each bough so that they would be more obviously melded together rather than remain separate.

 

With that done, I gave the tree a spray with Red Earth acrylic ink. A wash with black acrylic ink followed, applied by brush.

This was the first time I've used my Evolution CR plus in well over a year, as I've been without a compressor until a month ago. My trusted 25yr old 6 litre Simair blew a hole in its tank and it took me a while to find a suitable replacement, the Sparmax 620x, which whilst a bit noisier than I had expected, seems so far to be excellent. (Touch wood)

 

I then made a boo-boo, impatience, being the cause.  What I SHOULD have done was carry on making more twigs to fill in some of the gaps in the tree, whilst leaving a lot of open spaces THEN think about adding the foliage. What I actually did was give the twigs a spray with adhesive and sprinkle herbs over them. Which of course, looked rubbish and glued a lot of the twigs together. And a lot of herbs stuck to branches, boughs and the trunk. 

 

Still, not all was a disaster, because the herbs on the branches and boughs/trunk look like ivy, or moss etc. It got there accidentally, but I WAS intending to add it deliberately before the foliage goes on proper. Meanwhile, gluing a lot of the twigs together may actually  be beneficial, because I've done the same before, with the excessive use of CA. The twigs can be pulled apart, and in so doing, what was once two twigs, then looks like 1 twig split in two. I had the idea to do this before: gluing 4 or 5 pieces of line together to form a very thin branch, then pulling individual bits of line away to one side to make very small twigs. First though, I had to give the tree a soak in hot water to wash off the herbs and at least SOME of the adhesive. It's blooming strong stuff, and even after a soaking the fishing line remained sticky. 

 

So, that's the stage I'm at now; breaking up some of the glued fishing line twigs, whilst leaving others stuck together. I will then try splitting the latter up to form fishing line branches with fishing line twigs sprouting off of them.The tree as it stands now. At the very least there will be a root system added to the base, and potentially a short length of trunk.

 

Here you can see the 'ivy/moss', the remains of the herb sprinkle. Also note the white, which is the remains of the spray adhesive. There are many clumps of line (purple) which are still stuck together, but also some which are white because they've got more adhesive on.

 

 

The 'look' isn't actually bad, and I COULD make this a winter deciduous tree? Who knows? I don't. LOL

 

 

So, my plan for now is to carry on doing what I'm doing and build a leafless tree. If it looks realistic without any leaves, I'm going to leave it as and call it finished. If it doesn't look realistic, it will get leaves.

 

TFL

Badder

 

Edited June 2, 2021 by Badder

[Pig of the Week]

Herbs and You,  just don't seem to get on very well

[Badder]

15 minutes ago, Pig of the Week said:

Herbs and You,  just don't seem to get on very well

LOL

This time it's not the herbs that are the problem. It's the adhesive, or rather the aerosol can it comes in. Spraying it on isn't a good idea. I should have decanted it into a container and brushed it on exactly where I wanted it. That's what I'm going to do next time.

 

 

[Badder]

After further experiments, I've finally settled on a method for adding foliage to the tree.

 

The static leaf applicator DOES work, to some extent, but isn't perfect, mostly because I've been using it to apply leaves to large, already-made, bunches of fishing line twigs. It would work much better on individual lenghts of line, but then that would make the construction of the bunches extremely difficult. It would also be very time consuming, what with there being many thousands of lengths of line.  The main problem is not the method itself, after all, the majority of the leaves DO 'stand up', the issue is about the 'reality' of numbers. The number of leaves required to get a truly realistic effect on such a large tree, is mindboggling, just as in real life trees. We're talking tens, if not hundreds of thousands. It will never look truly realistic unless I applied tens, or hundreds of thousands of leaves. I thought I could get away with only leafing the outer parts of the tree, but then that would mean having to hide the 'empty' interior, which would look naked and stupid, otherwise, and then I'd be back to square one! Nevertheless, I did spend several hours punchin out hundreds of tiny 1.5mm 'oak-leaves' and applying them to a 'branch' of the tree which had around 8 bundles of fishing line twigs on it, The result was good, but even when doubling up the card and punching out 36 leaves per press of the punch, it would mean hours and hours and hours and hours of punching. Still, as I have said previously, it would be viable for making bushes.

 

In the end I decided to revert back to the original method, with herb sprinkle.

So, with all that faffing about experimenting over, I'm now cracking on with adding the foliage, inserting 'herbed-up' bunches of twigs into the tree. Here they are just poked in and not fixed in place. I will have to make some more as the tree is 50 percent larger in surface area than the original. Once I've made enough to leaf the tree I will pull them all out, finish off the trunks and boughs with more moss/lichen and bark effects and colourings, then fix the foliage in place and then give the leaves raking sprays with various shades of dark green.... this will be a conifer. How many times have I changed my mind on this? LOL.

 

 

 

 

 

TFL

Badder

 

 

 

 

[FrancisGL]

Hi Badder,

Congratultions mate!...you have exceeded 70k views, and in a section that is almost "marginal" in the forum, which makes it even more worthwhile ....
Cheers and TC
Francis.

[Badder]

6 hours ago, FrancisGL said:

, and in a section that is almost "marginal" in the forum

 

Calling this section 'Marginal' might get you lynched, mate. LOL

But thanks. 70k is incredible really, considering I've not done much work on it for a couple of years other than mess around with the tree and do a bit of adding moss around the building. I am close to finishing the tree though, with just the main bulk of the foliage to be added.

Once that's done I'll return to my Pit Stop dio and leave this one to sit for a while.

 

The diorama base is terribly dusty though. I may pop back and do a 'guide to vacuuming and cleaning a dust-covered diorama!' lol.

 

Keep safe my friend,

Rearguards,

Badder

 

[Badder]

To quote Sous-Chef de cuisine (Sergeant) B Baloney, Vietnam, 1970, 'I love the smell of coriander in the morning.'

 

I'd already glued the tree to the empty spool of fishing line to provide a stable base, and also as something I could use to pick up the tree without touching it. The tree was taken outside and sprayed with diluted PVA, roughly 60:40 water and glue. I tried to keep the spray as 'misty' as I could, but sometimes the pump-action dispenser (a window-cleaner) got a bit clogged and squirted a jet rather than a mist. So, the tree was given a shake before being stood on a sheet of A1 paper.

 

Coriander was then sprinkled over the tree from above, with jar being 'spiralled' around and down the tree to get the herbs on the lower branches and deeper within the canopy. The tree was then left to dry in the muggy afternoon air. Once touch-dry, the tree was put aside, the paper was folded roughly in half (without creasing it) and the herbs which hadn't stuck to the tree, or the paper, were funnelled back into the jar. I then held the tree upside down and given a second spray with diluted PVA and another shake. This time the herbs were sprinkled over the tree from underneath, with the tree held over the paper to catch the excess herbs for re-use.

 

The tree is now sitting in the garden to dry fully.

Whilst it MIGHT pass as a conifer right now, it is a bit too sparse in the foliage department. This will be remedied with the addition of more new foliage, and 2nd hand foliage from the original tree.

 

Then new and 2nd hand foliage will be poked into and threaded in between what's there now.

 

 

 

The very top of the tree............. an area which some might find difficult with regards to realism. The secret, people, is to have lots of vertical branches/twigs in the  centre, near-vertical branches around those, and then have them lean further outwards at the edges of the tree. And don't forget, that despite popular belief, most species of 'pine tree' branches angle upwards from the trunk, not downwards.

 

TFL

Badder

 

Edited June 7, 2021 by Badder

[Badder]

 

No photo update but..........

Some very bad news came our way this week in that our landlady is going to be selling the house. Sob! We love it here, out in the sticks, with the fields and woods on our doorstep. We can't imagine living back in a town and the 3 cats won't  like it either!  The good news is that we've been given plenty of time to find somewhere else to live before the house  is put on the market. Whatever, there will be a major upheaval and an obvious disruption to my model-making. So, I'm probably not going to get much more done this year, other than finishing this tree. With that my lone goal I'm going to spend more time on it, doing the very best job I can. So, the foliage IS going on, slowly and surely.

I'm about 1/3rd of the way up.

 

TFL

Badder

[Pig of the Week]

On 11/06/2021 at 20:00, Badder said:

 

No photo update but..........

Some very bad news came our way this week in that our landlady is going to be selling the house. Sob! We love it here, out in the sticks, with the fields and woods on our doorstep. We can't imagine living back in a town and the 3 cats won't  like it either!  The good news is that we've been given plenty of time to find somewhere else to live before the house  is put on the market. Whatever, there will be a major upheaval and an obvious disruption to my model-making. So, I'm probably not going to get much more done this year, other than finishing this tree. With that my lone goal I'm going to spend more time on it, doing the very best job I can. So, the foliage IS going on, slowly and surely.

I'm about 1/3rd of the way up.

 

TFL

Badder

Thats a bugger... Is moving to town the only option then ?  I'd have thought there would be places out in the country, as these surely are harder to let to folk working in towns ? ....Obviously I don't know your area or circumstances . I do hope you can find something you're happy with... 

[Badder]

On 6/14/2021 at 12:38 PM, Pig of the Week said:

Thats a bugger... Is moving to town the only option then ?  I'd have thought there would be places out in the country, as these surely are harder to let to folk working in towns ? ....Obviously I don't know your area or circumstances . I do hope you can find something you're happy with... 

It'll be the easier option, if we were in a hurry. Luckily we have some time. A lot of farm conversions/cottages that were being rented out are being sold though, probably due to the pandemic and money shortages for the owners? Dunno. It's all a bit xxxx.

Still, I can take my mind off things in the meantime by labouriously sticking twigs on a tree lol.

 

 

[Badder]

I'm about half way up the tree now, although because the tree is wider at the bottom that means I've probably added  2/3rds of the foliage. There's just a few more branch and twig assemblies to add on the reverse side. Once that's done, the last 1/4 of the foliage will be added as bundles of 'twigs' (line) rather than 'twig and branch' assemblies. That should make things a bit easier as I won't have to thread twig-branche assemblies into the tree and attach them to suitable er..... branches.

 

 

 

If I leave the trunk as it is, the tree will be about 2 inches taller than the original, 4 or 5 inches taller if I extend the trunk.

 

 

TFL

Badder

Edited June 15, 2021 by Badder

[Badder]

Getting there.

By the end of this evening, I MAY have the rest of the foliage added. With lots of 'bits' of foliage to add, It's a bit like making a jigsaw puzzle without having the cover picture: this bit doesn't go here, or here, but it might go here.....nope, here's the best place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

TFL

Badder

 

 

 

Edited July 2, 2021 by Badder

[Pig of the Week]

Good to see some more tree action...the red colour immediately reminded me of some of the camo "garnish" set you could get for Action Man.. Funny the stuff you remember!

Hope your accommodation hunting is looking promising too 👍

[Badder]

Hi everyone, I took a bit of a break from posting pics, but did continue work on the tree, adding  more foliage.

Knowing that I still had some more to add at the top, I thought it best to 'get in there', and spray the interior with matt varnish in preparation to adding the final  effects to the boughs and branches. And I also thought it would be a good time to spray the canopy with greens. I am now adding the last of the foliage at the top of the tree.

 

Once that has been sprayed with greens I will no doubt mess around with the positioning of the twigs, literally 'combing' through them to straighten up some of the more tangled twigs, then I'll give everything a heavy spray with varnish to fix it all.

 

That will leave me with just one more job, to sort the base of the trunk out. I've decided, in my wisdom, to make this tree removable. It will  sit nicely in this dio but when I eventually make a deciduous tree, I will be able to swap them over. This tree could then be placed in my Pit Stop dio, although, again, would remain removable as I'm going to make some pine trees to swap in and out as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BTW, the foliage looks quite dense in these photos due to the fact that the interior got sprayed with greens and the spot lighting ventured in, illuminating it and making the foliage look more solid. In actual fact there's a lot of openess to the canopy, with the internal branch and bough structure evident in ambient lighting and even more so with back-lighting. I will post pics of the tree in both circumstances later..

 

TFL

Badder

Edited July 15, 2021 by Badder

[Vince1159]

Absolutely fantastic Badder,lovely job....

[FrancisGL]

Hi Badder,

This tree is going to be a "living monument", and I really like the idea of it being "removable ... lol", very smart, if something can be used for more than one purpose, Great! ...

I hope that everything goes reasonably well there, today I heard in the news that you have already finished with the restrictions, I hope it is for the better ...

I go back to "mojo", to see if I decide to do something, because the number of kits in the stash certainly does not help to decide on one ... added to the heat ...🌞 so for now, at least I take photos of those that I finished a long time ago, and then publish it.

Cheers and TC
All the best,
Francis.👍