Armatures for the thicket are complete for now. There were fewer discards than I anticipated, and so, I may need to demote some of the first row trees to the second row as I start planting if the thicket comes out too diaphanous.
Once the armatures were formed and twisted into tree shapes, I coated them with Liquitex Modeling Paste, which is like a thickened matte medium. It is so thick, the trees quickly get gnarlier than the Major Oak*. I found, however, that by loading my brush with water, I could smooth it out substantially, and make tree trunks that reflected the smooth nature of the young trees of the thicket.
The paste dried quickly then I hit them with flat grey Rustoleum spray paint. This covered up the numbers on their bases very effectively, but fortunately, I’d written the numbers on the bottoms of the bases as well! The trees in the thicket all have grey trunks of one sort or another, and starting with grey makes the painting proceed quickly.
I made a spreadsheet of actual trunk colours based on the winter photos, and commenced painting the trunks. I’m using Folk Art matte “iron” (basically black), white and a tiny bit of “real brown maroon” to warm them up slightly. Each tree takes about five to ten minutes to paint; the indirection through the spreadsheet means I’m not capturing the true markings of each tree, but let’s be honest, the whole exercise was ridiculous from the start!
Finally, I teased out a little polyfiber (I have several lifetimes’ supply: hit me up if you need some!), painted it Camouflage Brown, and sprinkled on some ground foam and some Scenic Express Super Leaves to try out their textures and colours. The resulting second-row trees are definitely passable.
* How sad I was to learn that the Major Oak was declared dead this year! I remember visiting it as a Robin Hood-obsessed 6-year-old!
Pembroke:87 