fryingpancrusader asked: Hello there! So i'm an aspiring animator (still at university) and I'm in need of tree making tips for my upcoming stop motion project. I was wondering if you had more in depth info about how you made your trees and the resources you used. Please & thanks! And also what scale you were using.

Hello! I can definitely help you there. I bought some fairly long thin pieces of wood (at least a couple of cm wide so you can fit a screw in length ways) and a large piece of 3mm MDF board which I cut into 12cm squares. I then drilled a screw through the bottom of the MDF and into the wood- try getting it as neat as you can so that when you stand it up it doesn’t have any balancing issues. Then I bulked out the shape of the tree with tin foil, scrunching it around the wood, this is also when I attached the branches which were just sticks from outside. You don’t even need to glue the foil on it pretty much just holds itself on there but I did use some tape and a hot glue gun to hold the branches in.

And then it’s plastering time and it’s actually really important what plaster you buy! The first lot I bought dried way too quickly and got me nowhere but the second lot was perfect. I don’t know if you have the same brands or anything but it’s called Gyprock- Base Coat 45, the 45 meaning you can use it for 45 minutes before it dries, if you don’t have this just ask for plaster that takes 45 minutes. I then just slopped the plaster all over the foil and used something to carve grooves all through the plaster before it dried. After it dried completely I painted a light brown base coat and then used a wet brush to apply darker browns (and greens) over the tops so that it got into the cracks. This last part makes it look a lot more real but you can just paint it however you like. And the next part depends on your set but you can either screw the MDF base of the tree onto your set or I just ended up using a hot glue gun to stick them down. Then you’ll just have to cover the base to match the rest of the ground in your set, I just used dirt and glue. And if you want to move your trees around you simply unscrew or unglue the base.

Most of the trees ended up being 60-65cm tall compared to my 22cm character, so they were fairly big purely so I could do some nice wide shots. I hope that wasn’t too confusing, if you have any more questions just let me know. And below is a link to some pictures I blogged earlier to help you visualise things. I hope I helped and goodluck with your project! :D

http://donnayeatman.tumblr.com/post/27262904806