Aspen Trees

There sure is a lot of aspen and birch trees in smaller scales. It seems for us large scale folks, trees are a roll up the sleeves and make your own sort of project.

I went through several ideas and sources for the armature of the trunk or tree trunk. I experimented with pointed dowels and super tree material glued to them. Various twigs and sticks for armatures. Nothing was grabbing me. Another suggestion came to me to use Rabbit bush stems. Rabbit bush is a variety of sage brush I think. His trees look amazing but in the wild, I just haven't come across single trunk tall slender aspens. Another point I had to take into consideration is the aspens on my backdrop. They are all quite full with multiple large branching detail.

I was out watering one day and when turning off the bib noticed a plant next to the faucet called a Potentilla bush. Many of the branches had died on the lower half the bush and I grabbed one to examine.

This picture is in early spring before they flower.

Another Potentilla on the property with a few flowers. By June / July they are a mass of yellow flowers.

Anyway, this is what I started looking at. The dead branches. While the bush has shut off growth to these branches, they are still pliable and not very brittle. Plus, supper fine branching on each stem.

A closer look but still hard in the picture to see individual branches.

So I grabbed a pair of hand pruning clippers and cut a bunch of branches

First thing was to trim each branch for a better look. Styrofoam sure comes in handy doesn't it?

Then I drill a 1/16" hole in the base of each tree and pushed a 1/16" sharpened rod into it. This will help mounting the trees on the layout when completed.

This is a sheet of Rocky Mountain Juniper branches I harvested at the in-laws in Montana. Kind of the same but a little heavier branches.

Next up, I needed to make more fine branches on each natural branch. After watching dozens of You Tube video's I remembered a guy using sisal rope to make those smaller branches. So I got out the rope and started cutting 1/4" pieces off.

I'm using heavy wire cutters I bought from Micro Mark. I've also seen video's of guys using PVC cutters to cut rope squarely.

The rope I'm using is 3/8" Sisal from a building supply center.

A nice pile of pieces

Then I broke up all the chunks into individual strands of fiber

I then sprayed an armature with 3M 77 spray adhesive and sprinkled the rope fibers on.

Sometimes I would apply the fibers twice if I didn't think the fine branching was thick enough. When I was satisfied, I would let the armatures dry.

Once dry, I rattle can them white and using a fan brush, add black spot highlights that aspen and birch trees typically have.

When the paint was dry, I would first sift, with a common flour sifter, a fine light green scenic foam.

And finally, using a shaker bottle, a coat of medium green leaf flake and a just a tiny bit of light green flake

Here's another finished tree

As you can tell with my hand in the picture, the trees range in height from 9" to 12" or about 15' to 20' tall.

So, not a perfect aspen tree but compared to the trees on my backdrop, they look pretty close. Best of all, the armatures were free. Only paid for the spray glue, white and black paints and the Scenic Express Super Leaf flakes. Probably something in the 50 to 75 cents per tree price.