The Southern Yellow Pine -- Bottle Brush Style

The Blacktop Crossing layout seemed to need a little more of something to give it the truly Southern theme and locale.  What's more Southern than a Yellow Pine forest?  So, since the far, right-hand corner needed some scenicking, I thought a little knoll with a few pines would be just the thing. . . .

Hoping to make the trees myself, I reviewed several websites, YouTube videos, and such about making conifers via the "bottle brush" method.  Most of them, however, leaned toward spruces, cedars, and other conifers that had the typical "Christmas Tree" shape.  Of course, Southern Yellow Pines don't!  An example from my back yard:

While the top approaches a conical form, the bottom 2/3 is nothing but trunk.  Other prototypes are even less symmetrical!  But, what the heck, the bottle brush method looked like fun, so I gave it a try.

The materials I used, in most cases because it was what I had on hand, were:

Green florist wire, 20 gauge, 18" long

Sisal rope, ~1/4" diameter because is was what I had on hand

Masking tape, 1/2"

Leather brown Krylon satin spray paint (not latex, but what I had in garage)

Woodland Scenics fine turf, burnt grass

Woodland Scenics coarse turf, medium green

Tresemme' extra firm pump hairspray

Elmer's white glue

Clothespins with hole in the "handles" to hang on. . .

Cut clothes hanger for drying

1/4" square Balsa sticks

60-grit sandpaper

Fairly coarse "artsy" paintbrush

Acrylic, "artsy" paints -- bark brown, pewter grey, black

Florist moss from dollar store.

I doubled the florist wire to make about 9" long; cut about 4" lengths of rope, unwound, and combed.  My first try I used about a 4-5" length of masking tape that I spread some 4" sisalettes (stole this term from Chris on Model Railroad Hobbyist Magazine website) along the tape.  After placing the masking tape with sisalettes between the doubled wire, I hooked the looped end of the wire around a bird feeder shepherd's crook and chucked the other end in a variable speed drill motor.  When I turned the drill on (slow speed), the bottle brush was formed.  It looked OK, but the tape seemed to "push" the sisalettes into more of a spiral than I wanted.

So, for the next tree, I tried putting white glue on one leg of the doubled wire and placing the sisalettes on it.  The glue mostley dripped off of the wire, so for the third tree I just placed the sisalettes between the legs and let the "spring" of the doubled wire hold them in place.  That worked about as well as any, as long as I kept the sisalettes horizontal or supported them lightly as I turned the drill on.

With the three bottle brushes complete, I sprayed each one with leather brown paint -- including the "trunk" -- and dusted on the coarse foam while the paint was wet.  Then I sprayed with hair spray and dusted on the fine turf.  Frankly, I liked the coarse foam by itself.  I think I used too many sisalettes for Southern Pines and by the time I had added the fine turf, the foliage was VERY thick!?!  It's a little hard to see, but the far right tree only has the coarse foam.  [By the way, the picture is upside down since I was hanging the trees to dry on the cut coat hanger.]

Since the foliage in only on the top 1/4 to 1/3 of a Southern Pine, I had to make trunks.  For this, I used the 1/4" square Balsa dowels.  I drilled a hole, maybe 2" deep, to fit the twisted wire into one end of each dowel.  I hand-sanded the first one round, but chucked the other two into my drill and sanded them as they rotated in the drill.  Using fairly rough sandpaper, 60 grit, the trunks had a LITTLE bit of character.  I painted the first dowel with bark brown and tried to highlight by "dry brushing" with black.  For the other two, I used a blob of bark brown next to a blob of pewter grey on a styrofoam paper plate as a palette -- picked up a little of each color on my brush.  After painting all three, I think the greyish ones are a LOT closer to the actual color of my backyard Pine!

I added a few, small (!) pieces of floral moss to the trunks by first wallowing out a small hole with a #11 Xacto blade then putting a little white glue in the hole.  I had to hold the "dead limb" in place for just a few seconds before it would stand on its own.  I cut each bottle brush off to remove the loop at the top and to leave about 2" of twisted wire at the bottom.  Then, I used white glue as I inserted the twisted wire into the trunk.  Finally, I did a little trimming of the foliage.

The final results are not quite what I was hoping -- the foliage is too dense, the trunks are too straight (although a LOT of Pines have almost perfectly straight trunks), and the dead limbs are a bit off-color.  But, that's a good start for my stand of Southern Yellow Pines!  Some folks would say, "Just use these away from the front of your layout."  Problem is, the layout is too small to get very far away.  I like the two on the left OK, the one on the right needs a new "do".  I plan to make another handful or so and use fewer sisalettes. . . .