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Making Pine trees from Meadow-sweet

It's really a great shortcut to beautiful model trees using dried flowers from the Bridewort Meadow-sweet, also called Willow-leaf meadowsweet (Spirea salicifolia). I usually pick and store hundreds of these in September, October every year.

Glycerol as softener
The flowers start to get hard and fragile only a few hours after they have been picked. It's therefore necessary to put them overnight in an 80/20-mix of water and Glycerol. Use a bucket, or similar and make sure all of the flowers gets properly covered by the fluid.

24 hour drying
It takes at least another 24 hours for the flowers to dry after they have been overnight in the Glycerol blend. Let dry on a newspaper, or similar. It's now possible to store the flowers for over a year after you finalized this step.

Spruce or Birch?
The first step from flower to model tree is really just a question. Hold a flower in front of you and ask yourself "Is it a Birch, or Pine tree?" Once you have decided, it's time to trim the flower using a small pair of scissors.

Cutting and bending
I use the small curved type of scissor intended for surgical use. I first cut away the small leaves along the stem. Then I cut the foliage to desired shape and also gently bend the branches to get the same appearance as the model.

My model - A Swedish grown Birch
The foliage is painted using a airbrush.

Painting the foliage with airbrush
I like to start the paintwork once 20-30 trees from either Birch, or Pine has been cut ready. I then put them in a scrap foam board and airbrush the foliage on all of the trees, one at the time. The Pine trees can be painted with coloured paint directly, but the Birches need to have their foliage painted white first. I use the following colours for the trees:

Pine: Polly Scale MEC. Pine Green
(Art nr. F404052)

Paint stem with a brush
The stem can be painted once the foliage has dried properly. For Birch I first use Humbrol "White" matt colour. The gray and black areas are made using Humbrol "Black" matt colour. The Pines are painted using Humbrol "Rust", but only from the ground up to the first branches. Above that level I use Humbrol "Orange" slightly and randomly blended with "Rust" to get a natural and realistic look.

Foliage painted ready

Some trees need additional foliage
Some of the flowers tend to loose parts of the dried flowers in the process of being re-made to model trees. Therefore I sometimes add Woodland Scenic Light green fine turf. Spray the foliage with an 80/20 mix of water and white glue to make it stay. This method can also be used to simulate sprouts, or even fruits if the landscape should be early summer.

Here´s the video tutorial:

/ Martin T