Conifer

The conifer green of spruce growth

A cool green drawn toward gray differs from broadleaf vegetation at first glance. That is exactly how a spruce wood looks from close up, how young growth looks on a clearing, or a band of dwarf pine above the tree line. Anyone building a mountain scene, an alpine battlefield or a line running through a wood needs this shade before any other.

The grains have a coarse fraction, so volume can be built from them. The material does not behave like a pigment but like a tiny shrub: once glued the surface stays uneven and the light in it creates real shadows. The contents are 945 cm³, converted 57.7 cubic inches, which lasts a very long time on conifer growth.

Building conifer growth

On crowns the material is applied in small doses onto an armature coated with glue, never all at once. The tree is held above a sheet, the turf is sprinkled from above, and whatever does not catch falls back for further use. Two or three such layers give a crown the density one never has, and in between you can see where the armature still shows through.

On the ground it forms forest floor. Under conifers the growth tends to be sparse, so the turf is sprinkled only in islands among needles and roots. It also works well as a transition at the edge of a wood, where dark conifer green meets the lighter grass tones of a meadow.

The material can be used in any scale. In small scales it stands for whole trees covered in snow or mist, in large ones it makes individual branches of low growth near the ground. The cool tone also takes well to being completed with moss turf at the foot of a trunk, where growth tends to be darkest.