Layout Update: Sprucing Things Up, or Pining for the Woods

In advance of my work during the first Fedex Day I procured a variety of scenery materials including a bag of variably sized conifers*. They look fine if you don't look directly at them or make them the highlight of a scene, but they didn't get included in that round of scenery because other priorities intervened and I was put off by the trunk/roots at their base, which I suppose led me to de-prioritize them further. 

Nice variety of sizes but those roots have to go

In addition to making them look like Christmas trees the flatness of their bases was an impediment to mounting them on the uneven terrain I had created. In that respect at least I had achieved a "natural" result with my scenery!

So they languished in my scenery drawer until the most recent Fedex Day, when once again I put them at the end of the "do something with these" list with predictable results. However, that work got me thinking about them again.

Fast forward (slightly) to my backdrop work, after which I took a look at the corner behind the engine terminal: a gentle slope up to an abrupt meeting with the newly-extended backdrop. That seemed to be a good place for an experiment with a couple of aspects:

• Blending a three-dimensional foreground with a two-dimensional background
• Using forced perspective to heighten the sense of distance from the viewer

For installation, it's a bit hard to see in the photo above but the round trunk between the base and the bottom of the foliage has a consistent width and is of sufficient length to hold the tree steady if stuck in a hole. The trunk is plastic-sheathed wire, so out came the diagonal pliers for the surgery, and pin vise and 1/8" drill bit for the installation:

Snip => Drill => Plant

Once again excitement at having defined the task got the better of me so there are no "in progress" shots, but I ended up planting about a dozen trees in what I hoped was a random arrangement of size and color.

This first draft looked pretty good and achieved the goal of integrating background with foreground, but the start of the forest was relatively abrupt so the next day I Googled "pine forest edge" and got some good ideas for planting some smaller foliage in front of the trees. I grabbed my several bags of Woodland Scenics Clump Foliage (various sized and tinted bits of ground foam) and secured them to the scenery with white glue (the white dot on the upturned container on the track):

Foam => Glue => Position

It was really hard to achieve a random distribution with just a few shades of material, so future efforts will include a greater variety of materials for use.

Here is the scene in its current state, keeping in mind there are always additions/changes to be made:

Objects in viewfinder hopefully look farther away

I have already identified a couple other areas on the layout to plant more forest, including on the relatively steep slope above the mountain lake. There I may have to trim part of the lower foliage off one side so it can accommodate the slope. I will use smaller trees the higher up I plant them as a further exercise in forced perspective.

Not too bad for maybe an hour's work!

*Forgot to add this; good thing nobody reads this! My late father graduated from the NY Schools of Environmental Science and Forestry and not surprisingly knew a lot about trees, so he was usually pretty specific when referring to them. We also had two large Norway Spruce in our front yard when I was growing up so that reinforced the distinction