Step 4: Background Forest Canopy
To make the forest canopy behind the initial tree line and foreground scenery, begin by making some newspaper wads. Use whole sheets, half sheets, and quarter sheets of newspaper to make these wads. That gives you three sizes of wads to work with: small, medium, and large.
Choose some newspaper wads that are just a little lower than the foreground trees planted in step 2. These will be placed behind those trees to begin the background forest canopy.
On steep mountain slopes these newspaper wads can be placed directly behind the initial line of trees with no preparation, because the body of the foreground trees tends to hide them quite naturally. On more shallow slopes these newspaper wads will be seen in the openings between the tree trunks.
To avoid seeing the newspaper wads in these holes, take some green Micro Mark poly fiber, stretch it out thin, apply spray adhesive to the newspaper wad, then place the poly fiber on the wad.
Spray the poly fiber with either super hold hair spray, or spray adhesive, then apply the same coarse turf used for the leaves on the Super Trees. You can use any of the tree colors you want, but the Conifer green works good because it's dark and mimics the shadows that would be seen as you enter a forest. This particular newspaper wad had dark green coarse turf applied to it.
Spray the hill area behind the initial tree with spray adhesive, and place these turf covered wads directly behind the initial line of trees with the turf covered area facing forward. This camouflages the newspaper wads so they can't be seen.
Spray the rest of the mountain to be forested with spray adhesive and continue to add plain newspaper wads all the way to the top of the mountain.
It's best if you leave a little space between each wad. You can use newspaper wads of all the same size if you want, but you get a more irregular, and more natural forest canopy if you intermix the wad sizes together. Generally speaking you will use large and medium size wads toward the base of the mountain, to blend in well with the foreground trees, and progress to medium and small size wads the further up the mountain you go.
After the newspaper wads are in place, take a small clump of green poly fiber and stretch it out thin. You can use a thicker mat of poly fiber if you want, but this technique was designed to use the minimum amount of material needed to get good results. Coat the the newspaper wads with spray adhesive and apply the poly fiber mat in small sections, until the whole mountain side is covered.
Next, spray the poly fiber that's on the newspaper wads with a coat of spray adhesive. It seems to work best if you spray a section of the mountain at a time rather than trying to do the whole mountain in one shot.
Once the spray adhesive has become tacky, place clump foliage over the poly fiber, using the same clump foliage colors as used for the foreground bushes. You can vary the color of the clump foliage as you cover the mountain, but it looks best if you have bigger sections of the same color, rather than trying to mix the colors of the clump foliage all together.
The final step of the forest canopy is to take some of the Super Tree sprigs as were placed in the clump foliage around the base of the trees, and place them into the clump foliage that makes up the tree canopy. Using larger sprigs for the tree canopy works best, and represents trees that are slightly taller than the surrounding canopy. As with the foreground scenery, these sprigs suggest a larger branch network hidden under the forest canopy.
Occasionally you will find some spots in the foreground where you can see a newspaper wad showing through.
These spots are easily fixed by shooting some spray adhesive into the area where the newspaper is showing and adding some extra clump foliage to cover the newspaper wad totally. The conifer green color clump foliage again works good for such situations.
After all is done the scenic materials are rather loosely held by the spray adhesive. Let the scene sit over night to dry, then spray with a light coat of matte medium/water mixture (1 part matte medium to 5 parts water). Don't go too heavy with this first coat, as it tends to cause pieces of clump foliage to let go and fall off. Let the matte medium spray coat dry over night. You can then go back over it with a second heavier spray coat of matte medium mixture to fix the scenic items in place more firmly.
