A few weeks ago, I mentioned to Louis-Marie we should keep an eye open for cheap Christmas trees. They would be useful for background conifers... then, a few days ago, he call me. At a garage sale, someone is selling a bunch of used ones for a song. He send me a picture, they look horrible, but at that price what can go wrong?
Then yesterday evening. I finally can see them... What a let down. In bad shape, full of fibrous imitation snow. But eh, a beggar can't be a chooser. Why not experiment with them. With a pair of scissor, looking at real spruce, I start to trim branches here and there to reshape them and change their caricatural silhouette. After a while, I get this...
Not too bad, but still a lot of excess branches which I trim accordingly. Them, it's time to move in the garage with some spray cans. The tree armature is painted dark camouflage brown then misted generously with dark green. When the paint is still wet, dark green 3mm static grass is sprinkled on it. The color is a little bit too uniform, so I spray dark brown shadows in the recesses and some dark green on the main branches... Still a little bit dark to my taste, until I mist it from the top with very light passes of bright apple green to creates highlights as can be seen on real evergreens.
Finally, a few trees are ready to plant on the layout. They are not perfect, but for a 1 hour project, they certainly blend well with the backgrop and provide variety and colors to the layout while hiding the photobackdrop seem.
I think I'm sold. Next time, I'll try to model a few cedar trees out of these cheap Christmas decoration.
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