How to turn TEABAGS into model tree leaves!

that's a lovely Brew hi guys and welcome back to the channel this week I'm going to be showing you how to turn this used tea bag into a bit of foliage and we're going to turn it into a lovely autumnal tree so come on let's go down to the workbench and I'll show you how it's done so obviously we're going to start off with a pile of used tea bags and I'm going to take a baking tray and gently and tear those tea bags open just spreading out the leaves inside over and over the baking tray getting ready to eventually put them in the oven to dry now you can get quite a lot of tea in uh a couple of tea bags I think I've got together about uh eight or nine or so so once you've got them spread out onto the baking tray we can go and stick it into the oven for a while and with the magic of time this is the tray after I've given it um about half an hour in the oven on low setting it's nice and dry now and it's got a lovely kind of powder to it so next I'm going to tip those dried tea leaves into a plastic container using a Sie we'll just gently siiv out the smaller particles and we should get quite a lot out of this and the excess I'll just uh put to one side maybe to use later on and we do end up with quite a lot of tea after we've sifted it all out this is just a quick edit just to slip between the two as you can see quite a lot of tea in that tub and now I'll just get three little pots and I'm going to separate those two leaves into three using these three colors I've got a green there and sort of medium orange and a dark orange I'll just put a bit of color into each of these tubs these quite bright colors to start off with but after they've been mixed with the tea leaves and dried out in the oven they'll be quite muted down now I'm going to mix those tea leaves into the paint colors just a generous handful scoop into each pot we don't really want to mix a lot just yet but you can mix as much or as little as you want and now I'm going to introduce just a little bit of moisture into each one just to let the paint run a little bit more smoothly throughout give each of those pots a thorough stir to get the color mixed in there like I said these colors are quite Vivid at the moment they're A nice bright orange automo looking color when we bake it down it's going to reduce down a little bit so we'll just carry on mixing this is the medium orange it looks quite a bright orange now um yeah give it a thorough stir and then onto the green just to finish off and at this point it's uh it's a an experiment mixing with quantities here just adding a little bit more tea into the mix until we've got a nice consistency of color and tea leaves and once we're mixed thoroughly we're left with these three neat looking pots and what we can do with this now is tip them out onto a baking tray and put them in the oven to dry out and while we were waiting for that to dry we're going to get some seafoam now seafoam is a natural product you can buy online I got mine from a company called green stuff world but there are lots of other suppliers it's a natural product as I say it uh it resembles trees and uh small shrubs as it comes as a plant you can also get them as seeds to grow your own they are quite difficult to grow but I find them extremely useful and you get quite a lot in a single packet it tends to stretch quite a long way now on their own they're represent little saplings but with a bit of careful adjustment as I'm going to do now we can make a slightly bigger tree so I'm just going to select this piece take off the lower pieces and I'll select a few more bits and pieces from from what I've got left and we can start building up a bit of a structure here some of the pieces end up being a little bit bent just due to the way that they're grown and also the way they're packaged just careful bit of twisting and shaping gets me the the type of shape that I want going to glue that piece on there now just to add a little bit of extra thickness and depth to it and I'm going to do that using some super glue super glue is perhaps the best medium for gluing these trees together but uh it does take a little bit of doing it helps if you have some activator spray but what I tend to use as a substitute is some bicarbonate of soda just get a little bit of that powder and sprinkle it on into the gaps as you can see this is from Morrison's if we just put some super glue onto the gaps the rier stuff tends to be a little bit better in terms of setting but uh I'll just put some super glue here between the two pieces I've just put on and then I'm going to sprinkle some bicarbonate of soda on and that will uh that will solidify and hold the thing together it also gives it some nice texture and if you're not too careful you end up super gluing your fingers to the trees so you've got to be really really careful especially when you're playing around with Superglue I'll just trim the excess off at the bottom there leaving a bit of a stalk on there for propping it into the eventual place that it's going to go a little bit more foliage here to bulk out the sides I've just got the tree a little bit off camera there rcky mistake and yeah another little piece that was going in there that's starting to look nice now that bit's a bit too long so I'm just going to snip it off with a pair of scissors now here it's a little bit too thin in terms of trunks so I'm going to bulk it up with with a a little offcut of uh plant sea sea moss and Sea Foam not sea moss sea moss is something completely different SE frame so we'll just put a bit of super glue onto that trunk there and stick that in place activator would have helped so so much better but we're going to use some bicarbonate of soda here to solidify that joint and as I say it does add a little bit of added texture closes that gap between the the two pieces and will give us something nice to work with I am starting to stick my fingers to the trunk there anyway through the medium of time we've gone out into the garage and given this an undercoat of black and white it probably could have done with a gray if you've got a gray that it's much better color to use going to use a medium brown now to paint the trunk just giving it a quick coat here this is not the final color it's just a base coat you don't see many trees that are pure brown this just gives me something to work from just making sure it goes into the branches up there and I'm going to give it a little bit of gray dry brushing soor I actually missed out the gray dry brushing here so if you can just imagine that I have given this a dry brush of this medium gray color and now I'm going to run over it with the good oldfashioned shade paint called null nil this is just going to uh darken off those little areas of relief and texture everybody knows that trees aren't really Brown they usually Shades of Gray and here we go uh with the hair dryer an excellent technique for uh speeding up the process here so we just use a hair dryer to dry off the paint ready for the next stage moving into the spray booth now I'm just going to give this a coat of hairspray this is just a cheap hairspray it's it's an excellent adhesive for scenery it's only a temporary adhesive it's not permanent adhesive it is actually water soluble so it's always a good idea to top up with a spray varnish so now I'm going to use these three colors that I've premixed for the tea and use it to sprinkle gently over the areas where I've put the hairspray adhesive another coat here now after the first coat of tea leaves on new foliage this is a the medium orange having started off with the green it's not really a green after it's come out of the oven it's looking all the colors are looking a little bit muted but that's a that's a good autumnal shade I think if I was going to do this again I wouldn't have sped the process up and just let them dry naturally but in this current weather it's going to take quite a long time to to dry so building up the layers gradually starting off with the sort of orangey green color then the mid orange and then finally a highlight of the lighter orange just like I say building up some texture with the various highlights as well and then another seal with the hairspray and a little bit more orange and now I'm going to stick this on to the base you might recognize the base from another video I'll just put the link up in the corner there this is how to build a stone walls I've drill drill the hole ready to accept the tree and just stick that in place with a spot of superg glue oops just slipped out of my hand there and what I'm going to do next is add a little bit of color highlight just to lighten off some of those areas there that are looking a bit too dark so I'm bringing out my medium rust color again and this Citadel layer paint a bright yellow and with a paintbrush I'm just going to dot on some bits of color starting off with the orange I'm just going to dot some little highlights just here and there all around the edges just highlighting the odd leaf or two maybe a little bit too much there it's just giving it a little bit of interest and then finally we'll highlight with the bright yellow again just adding that little bit of extra highlight for those lovely autumnal shades at this point now I can start adding some glue to the base this is going to be where the fallen leaves are going to go so just dot some PVA all around the base and over the top of the wall all the little areas where you're wanting the fallen leaves to appear and I'm just going to sprinkle some of that medium orange all around the base it does make a really excellent foliage medium I know a lot of Railway modelers use tea leaves for sort of grassy soil areas but uh I think this does make a really realistic looking dead foliage of course you can play around with all kinds of colors and shades to get what you want over here we're going to go go just around the base of the tree and around the other side of the wall just to make a complete diarama it's not just one side it's like a fully fully made up base like I said this um this stone wall base diara is a video I've done previously I've left the link in the top right corner previously I'll uh link to it again at the end if you want to see that being made but yeah just finishing off here with some Fallen foliage and that's it pretty much done now and it's on to the outside shots nothing beats taking a few photographs in the uh outside daylight so guys that's it that's your Autumn Tree made from tea leaves please let me know in the comments what you think if there's anything you else you'd like to see and and uh follow me for more subscribe hit that subscribe button guys and uh get more content like this catch you all later thank you for watching

Channel: LNR Models

Views: 60,312

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Id: X7ZFe1HYdfA

Length: 14min 10sec (850 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 31 2023