Seven Pines

Earlier I had made three "Southern Pine Trees" using the bottle brush method.  The intent is to place a small hill on the back, right corner of the layout with a pine "forest" on it.  Well, three trees does not a forest make, it seems.  SO, back to the bottle brushes to make a few more.

I took the same approach as before (see the earlier post on Southern Pines) with a couple of exceptions.

First, I only applied the coarse ground foam after spraying the "brush" with brown paint.  I did not use the hair spray for a second coating of fine ground foam.  I felt the first batch had too much "foliage" for a pine tree.  My backyard ("prototype") tree was much "airier" -- you could see lots of sky through the branches and needles.

I used the same method to "turn" 1/4" square balsa dowels into tree trunks:  I chucked each one into my drill and ran them gently against a sheet of relatively coarse (maybe 60 grit) sandpaper.  I applied light pressure with my fingers behind the paper.  The last dowel was too weak to use the drill; it kept breaking off at the chuck.  So, I pulled out my Dremel tool with a sanding drum and worked on that dowel until it was close to being round.  The gouges that the sanding drum caused caught me attention.  I went back to the other "trunks" for the day and applied the drum to them in various places.  This gave the trunks a more natural look, in my opinion.

For the "dead limbs" on these pines, I used dried flowers (Natural Dried Caspia) that I had picked up from Michael's.  For the first group, I had used reindeer moss, but those limbs turned out to be rather hairy and green!  By picking through the dried flowers, I was able to cut out some pieces that looked more like naked branches.  Then I used some of the gray with brown paint that I had used for the trunks to paint the dead branches.  I even went back to the trees with reindeer moss and painted their dead limbs.

A couple of these trees are approaching 100' tall.  That's within the range for full-grown Southern Pines, but I may decide to shorten them.  My wife said the trees look "strong" -- I think she's being polite instead of saying "too tall"!?!?!

I'll need to fabricate the hill before I forest it, but here are the trees, first group of three (with the hairy dead limbs) and second group of four.  With a little undgrowth here and there, I think that's enough for the forest!