Making Small Scale Trees out of Cardboard Shards

I start by cutting thin shards of grey cardboard, the kind you might find in packaging. The thinner the better, but they don’t have to be too thin. Once you have several shards it is time to get a bottle of Elmer’s glue. Decide how tall you want the tree to be, I am making trees for N and HO gauge, so decide how many scale feet tall you want the tree to be.

I start with two shards of cardboard. I roll each of the strips between my fingers to round them out a bit. I then put them together and dip one end in some Elmer’s glue. I roll these together at the bottom to form the tree’s trunk, adding other strips at various lengths to create the tree’s limbs. Sometimes, for a more complex tree structure, I add these limbs to the center of the much.

Once you have the basic structure, it is time to add some leaf texture. I soak the whole tree in Matte Medium, (you could also use a diluted white glue, like Elmer’s), one to stiffen up the tree trunk and limbs and too supply some sort of adhesive for various textures and colors of ground foam and or poly fiber.

I am not trying to model any one species of a tree, except for the one evergreen tree. This was created by spearing bits of scotch bright pad on a round stained tooth pick. Foe the other trees, I just wanted to create set of random tree and used random colors and textures of ground foam.