Woodland scenics clump foliage

[unittrain]

Just picked up some clump foliage from WS and was wondering if this is good for trees I picked it up at my local Hobby Lobby. I was considering super trees also. Which is the best? I might even use a combination of both.

[MichaelWinicki]

After playing around with it numerous times, using it with Woodland Scenic's armatures, I think it can make a decent background tree.

For foreground tress, SuperTrees are outstanding.  So is using Woodland Scenic's armatures along with poly fiber, and then covering with some color of turf.   

The best trees appear "airy".  You can see through them.   

Clump foliage doesn't easily offer that.  But as a background tree it's fine. 

One thing to suggest though, is to add some different colored turf to some of the clump foliage trees so you don't end up with a "light-green, medium-green, dark-green" checkerboard of trees.  When I was out for my walk today, I noticed once again, how many shades of green that trees come in.  Heck one tree can vary in color from top to bottom and side to side.

Here's a clump foliage tree:



Here's a poly-fiber tree:

[DKS]

If you're patient, you can make fairly acceptable trees with clump foliage. The trees in the background of this image were made by gluing smallish bits of clump foliage to real brush twigs. The twigs were carefully selected for their general tree shape, sprayed with grey primer, then clumps were glued to the branches such that there was a bit of see-through effect. They're OK for background trees--these were planted in a block of foam and moved around to wherever they were needed during photo shoots. For foreground trees, I'd tend to go for SuperTrees.
 

[Ed Kapuscinski]

I'm not a huge fan of clump foliage. But I do see it's appeal.

The Super Trees are really the best starting point (unless you're going to make your own wire armatures).

My opinion on this is that you need to take a critical look at an actual tree, and try to model that. Don't just work off of memory.