Water and Trees
I looked into using the acrylic gloss finish medium for water. A good sized jar of it was less than $3 bucks at the art store and it paints on real easy and allows lots of control. I think I must have put on 4 or 5 coats of the stuff by now and I am very pleased with the results. It has just enough shine to it to cast reflections without the glare that gives a phoney look. My next task will be to try to suggest spanish moss using balled up gray thread, cut and pulled and place in the cypress trees.
By the way, the cypress trees were made with Sculpy modeling clay, rolled between my hands into long rods that tappered at one, and then I formed the flared root base at the other, then baked them till firm. After they cooled, I took two lenghts of green florist wire and twisted them around the trunks, at top and mid way up forming a wire support to hold the green branch material. Leave them extra long, so you can zig zag them and have good support for the branch material, and cut to size. This made 4 supports per tree. Glue the wire in place, paint the trunks with three tones of grays, dark-mid-light, highlight with some white/moss green and glue the branch material in place. These things realy mock up fast.
Just to try it out, I did an test of using a lenght of stranded #10 copper wire to make a tree trunk base. I used about a 4" lenght and twisted out the top half to form main branches and left the bottom half toghther as the trunk, then I dipped the whole thing in plaster of paris, set it to dry, painted the thing shades of gray, glued on some green clump foam and it sure looked like an oak tree...got to make a few more of those.
Gonna play around with some a/c filters to see what I can mock up with that, I have seen some articles in books about using foam with that to make bushes and trees.
Nick Weber
Bywter Railroad
New Orleans