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 Posted - April 09 2015 : 4:03:45 PM
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All over the Midwest, cedar trees sprout from the sides of cliffs. They're usually gnarled and scraggly because of their difficult circumstances. On a layout, a little vegetation helps our model cliffs look a bit more like natural cliffs, so I've been pondering how to model a gnarled cedar for a long time. Here's my first attempt:
Vacationing in the West, I found some nice dead sagebrush twigs. Vacationing near Lake Superior, I found some reindeer lichen uprooted in a trail through a dune area behind a beach. The lichen, when glued to the sagebrush twigs makes a nice twig structure for a cedar tree. Foliage is ground foam glued to the branches with carpenter's glue.
Since cedar bark is a mix of weathered gray and reddish brown, I drybrushed both the sagebrush and lichen with mottled spots of reddish brown paint. Here are the main ingredients:
Here's the tree in its natural habitat:
These take a while to build, so you could never mass-produce a forest of them, but in the real world, they grow as a few isolated individuals so there's no demand for them by the dozen.
Carpe Manana!
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Posted - April 09 2015 : 4:57:49 PM
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| Now that looks real. Nice work.
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Posted - April 09 2015 : 5:02:26 PM
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| Very realistic, nice work.
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Posted - April 09 2015 : 6:01:20 PM
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| That's looks great! And it also looks like long way down! :-)
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Posted - April 09 2015 : 8:43:40 PM
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Thanks! More than once, I've clung to such a tree above a long way down.
Carpe Manana!
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Posted - April 09 2015 : 11:20:24 PM
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That's a realistic tree there!
And about clingng to such a tree above a long way down - I can't help but wonder if alcohol was involved?
Glenn
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "... I drank what?"
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 Posted - April 09 2015 : 11:43:00 PM
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gnarley, dude
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Posted - April 10 2015 : 12:03:28 AM
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quote:And about clingng to such a tree above a long way down - I can't help but wonder if alcohol was involved?
Originally posted by gmoney - April 09 2015 : 11:20:24 PM
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I don't drink. I've always been able to be obnoxious without any help. 
I used to go rock climbing fairly often and spent a lot of time on the sides of cliffs. Places to do that are getting harder to find as climbing is prohibited in more places. There are just a handful of places left, around here, and big climbing clubs come and set up their equipment on all the climbs, taking up all the room there is. Then, they sit around with flies buzzing in and out of their mouths not using the cliffs they're hogging. As the sport is losing its charm, I spend less time climbing of late.
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Posted - April 10 2015 : 12:43:12 AM
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| Very nice modeling on that tree Don. I know those things take time and patience. Your choice of materials seems solid. I attempted modeling some Englemann Spruce and Lodgepole pine types using Yarrow for pine boughs on a thin dowel trunk with a tiny hole drilled for each bough. Took quite a spell. And then, they are so fragile.
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Posted - April 28 2015 : 01:39:45 AM
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| Great tree!
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Posted - July 01 2015 : 10:22:08 PM
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small tree,looks vrey good
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