Pine Tree Project

After a lot of pine tree observing and testing various materials my pine tree project is moving along, slowly. Pine wood dowels shaped on a belt sander in lengths of 6inches to 14 inches provide a diversity for the forest I am assembling. Trunks were rolled in a narrow V corner of a baking pan that I poured diluted paint into. This provided a way to paint the trunks in seconds without dragging a brush up and down the sanded trunks. The sanding also, in close viewing, gives the trees a much more wood like appearance. The Branching is tree moss gathered from a park, dried, torn into bits. The Bits were flattened between my fingers, one side lightly brushed over white glue. Resulting branch was touched into Woodland Scenic T-65 dark green turf. After assembling a hundred assorted size branches came the fun part of sitting with a hot glue gun and hot gluing branches on to the trunks. I was not happy with the look of the hot glue semi transparency so I cast a mold of a hot glue stick and melted / colored / poured light brown into the mold and cast my own colored hot glue sticks. Pricing colored sticks on the Internet left me gasping at the price or at the total number of sticks for a minimum order, hence making my own.

A few pointers I recorded about the "typical" pine trees. Their branches didn't come out more than about 8 feet from the trunk. Trees that are over 10 feet tall and with in branch reach of another pine tree will have no branches between them as wind action knocks them off. Pine branches are not very strongly attached to the trunks. Most older stand alone trees have lost their lower branches to fires, so really tall trees have branches on their upper 1/3 rd of their trunks.

New growth tend towards spacing about 3 or 4 feet apart and look like heavy brush rather than miniature pine trees, its not till cleared by animals, man or fire that they start getting taller.

The final trees get a coating of diluted pva glue before I base them, though I'm still playing around with bases for them. More on the next post about that.