Trees have been driving me crazy lately. The store-bought or Internet-order choices you have tend to follow these themes, pretty much:
- Arsey looking plastic trees that look like foamy green poofs impaled on brown sticks
- Expensive arsey looking plastic trees that look like foamy conical green poofs impaled on brown sticks
- Really expensive arsey looking plastic trees that look like squiggly shaped green poofs impaled on brown sticks
- Arsey looking DIY tree kits that are basically identical to #1-#3, except YOU put them together yourself, and the instructions give you the distinct impression that 6 hours from opening the package, you’ll end up curled under your desk in a fetal position looking like the illegitimate lovechild of Oscar the Grouch and a porcupine
- Oh, and all of the above are in the wrong scale
- Overpriced injection molded trees from Games Workshop that look like evil refugees from a Disney cartoon or the baby-eating tree in Poltergeist
- Really nice looking and frighteningly expensive trees that look like they will break or fall apart the second Greasy McCheetofingers looks at them funny
So, since all of the store-bought options are pretty much ruled out, that leaves doing them myself. There are several methods, but I chose the twisted-wire method because I have everything needed except the foliage. In that method, you twist soft wire (copper wire or florist’s wire) into something approximating a tree, you spackle or putty over the armature, and then you glue clumps of foliage onto it.
This is the second wire armature I’ve done:
It looks semi-reasonably tree-ish to me. It’s also fun and dirt cheap to do, so I’m going to do several more wire tree armatures for practice. Once I hit on a flow that I like, I’m gonna experiment with various non-messy methods of bulking out the armature and giving it a nice bark texture.
Mel, I like to wrap the complete armature with the sticky masking tape that florists use for flower arangments (sp) and then glue it to the base.
Where I have the problem is getting foliage on the darn thing… any ideas??
I figured I was gonna have to superglue clump foliage to it after barking it out.
-Mel
Did you decide on a foliage? Because the wire is a good trick, and all you need to do is paint it brown, the twist will look good for table top. I bought a 1/8 yard for green fake fur cut up into clumps for foliage
Nah, I never got that far. I threw the tree armatures out around the same time that I had to sell off most of my gaming stuff during the office clean-out a few months ago.