Making Pine Forests

What can you make toy pine trees from? How about pine cones?

The most difficult bit is to cut off the base of the cone for a good surface to glue. Then you can use them as is except for a coat of green paint or you can add some other levels.


                      Here I glued the cones to some irregularly shaped and bevelled foam.

                                            The whole thing is liberally coated in PVA glue.

      Then it is all coated in sawdust. (My local hardware gave me a free huge bag of this which will last a lifetime).

I'll give it a couple of days to ensure it is thoroughly dry before painting. The only thing to be careful of is melting the foam with certain paints. If it is not fully sealed it will react, especially to enamels and aerosols in general. You will then have big holes melting into the terrain - it actually looks good with some terrain pieces but you can end up with not much left.

ALTERNATIVE PINE TREES

Old plastic Xmas trees can be obtained for next to nothing from garage sales (yard sales in America) or op shops (charity shops - thrift shops in the US). You can use complete sections of the tree or just the ends, depending how tall you want your trees.Remember a tree can be a multitude of heights. A short pine tree is a baby tree!

Anyway here are some big ones I made yonks ago. The sections of tree are hot glued into holes in a jigsaw cut piece of old timber.