Nowadays, the cool kids are all using static grass to make the tiny lesser branches and twigs for their trees. As with my leather tie and Adidas bag, I tried to copy them, but the look fell flat. My static grass mostly missed the mark, and the few fibres that connected clung to the armature the way my friends and I gripped the walls at the dance, rather than sticking out proudly like the senior football team or like branches of a tree.
I contented myself with sipping the constantly-guarded punch and went back to polyfibre for branch structure. For each tree, I selected a small amount of painted brown polyfibre and stretched that out further until it barely held together. Aileen tacked the twig structure to the wire branches, and the resulting worktop looked enough like a forest in winter to convince me I was on the right track.
I stayed with Super Leaves for decorating the trees. Most of the trees in the thicket have medium green leaves, but there were a few distinctly brighter ones and one overachieving maple tree with noticeably larger leaves. The maple tree trunk was easy to identify as tree number 16. The lighter green trees were impossible to tease out of the mass, and so I selected a few trees that were in the right areas, and assigned them the light-green species, whether they deserved it or not.
I applied the hairspray and leaves in the spray booth. The spray may be benign in the quantity you’d apply to your hair, but not for a forest. It took several trees to learn that it was possible to avoid blowing the polyfibre off the tree. By starting away from the tree, I could modulate the spray so that it came out gently and nicely saturated the twigs without getting a lot of spray on the trunk. I then quickly sprinkled dark leaves from below and to the side, followed by some medium green leaves from above and to the side. Most trees needed only one sprinkling. My species-assigned trees got medium and spring green Super Leaves.
For the maple, I wanted bigger leaves. I found some appropriate flakes from Mountain Pacific in my scenery drawer. They were a lighter, bluer green than the Scenic Express leaves, and so I hand-painted them after they were stuck to the tree. The colour is still too blue, but hopefully it’s in the ballpark.
Apart from the maple trees, leafing went quickly and I soon had a desk full of trees, any one of which would pass scrutiny by itself.
