Trees
Is your intentt to be making the foliage in addition to branches and trunks, just branches and leaves, or just trunks. What is your budget if any? What type of tree anyway? And how real are we talking, three dimensional, two dimensional relief, or two dimensional outline? What’s the application - will people be touching it or things hitting it, and what’s the fire code necessity for it? We don’t want another Coconut Grove here.
This and budget would be primary factors to define better. Stuff like fiberglass or tuff coated and flame resistant foam might be only options in a public space for the trunk, verses at home you can relax the flame treating a
bit. Wolf’s
burlap could be interesting especially if you were to
starch, even
epoxy as in fiberglass coat it solid after it’s shaped. Otherwise you can do the same with a heavy wight
muslin.
Both can be on carpet tubes, linoleum tubes, fabric tubes and tubes from wrapping paper, which can be cut and blocked to get angles out of them and supported with lumber as necessary, the problem is you can’t really use a water based paint or adhesive as well on the thinner tubes so you might want to treat them with either a contact cement on the tube, spray adhesive or construction adhesive on the tube’s surface before applying the fabric. Otherwise it might be possible to prime the tubes with paint than use your adhesive to attach the fabric. Something like a Plex Glue or Sobo should work well if not watered down to the adhesive or paint. Use a glue/starching method at least on the fabric covering that’s no more than 1/4 watered down on the first side, than paint the outside after dry. Before you put down the fabric you can also glue even
hot glue tie
line to the tubes for more grain and knots, or if you have wood cores screw other branches onto the primary ones as long as you use
countersink bits if not blocks.
For branches, it might be easiest to see if you can find some old crappy camouflage netting and cut off the leaves, even cut them into sections of three pieces long, cut two of them down to about ½" wide and
hot glue them around some
wire. You can than cut the final leaf into your leaf shape and paint it. Camouflage netting should be inherently flame retardant and very strong thus my advising it. Plus if you can even get a 12'x8' diamond shape, its going to be more than enough material to work with and you will have a strong net left over. Otherwise see what your florist shop has cheap and plastic or silk, or go to a fabric store and see what they have for something vinyl coated or leather like with a fabric backing for strength. Than away you go with the magic
scissors. If doing something two dimensional or on relief, you can use the netting to support the leaves between branches also.
On larger trunks, you might cut blocks for the trunk to match up with it’s cross section and do 1x2 boards down it’s length to support and span between the blocks. That’s about the standard way of doing it. To
cover the
burlap, fabric or even large sections of cardboard especially if it’s ribbed outboard, than covered with a lighter fabric.
Note on all but the leaves, if in a public area you would need to use flame treating on all surfaces. inside and outside. This is usually done after it’s painted though you might be better off doing it before
hand because otherwise the flame treating tends to leave little white splotches all over everything no matter how
clear it is supposed to be.
Anyway some notes I would have on technique but it's been a few years since I did anything like this.