Food for thought

Hello Ed,

Do you really need that many trees?  If you can arrange for the first 2 or 3 rows of trees to form a view block so that it's not possible to see further in to the forest, then the remainder of the trees can be represented by just the crowns of the trees.  Tony Koester wrote about this in one of his columns in Model Railroader.  So, thousands of tree tops, are much easier to represent than thousands of trees....lichen puff balls covered with appropriate colored ground foam for decidouus trees, conical shapes covered with dark greens for conifers.

Just a thought.

Bill

...

That's the right number of trees, if you want it to look best, you do it all the way, not half of the way...

M.J.F. has a couple great tips on making inexpensive realistic looking trees.  I'd build the layout and then fill in the forests as time permits...

Desidous versus pine... tree numbers

For deciduous areas, I think the 3 to 4 rows then canopy look makes sense.  That may work for me in areas around Madison and the wetland which has a fair amount of deciduous on the edges of the wetland.  But most of northern NH is dominated by conifers.  I'm a little less certain about how well it will work on mountainsides with the conifers.  I will have plenty of area to experiment with.  But I'm also ok with it taking me several years doing small areas at a time.  I figure as the layout progresses and I start working on trees in the lower level where they are not quite as dominant, I should get enough practice to get pretty good and quick at it by the time I get to the massive tree counts on the second level from Arethusa falls past Crawford Notch.

-Ed

"Do you really need that many trees?"

Not if you model a clear cut operation? :> )  but then you gotta model stumps and slash and erosion so it's probably a wash when it comes to effort?......DaveB