As I showed on my Eastern Friendly Indians topic, I tried to make some bushes. Since some of you asked me how it was done I decided to make small tutorial of how I make it. I combined some techniques and ideas I found online and I'm quite happy with the results. Still, there is a lot of room for improvement...
So, what you'll need for making bushes? List of materials is following: white glue, dirt, old paint brush (for painting walls, not artistic), baking paper, hair spray, static grass (2,5mm) and some scatter or leaves (I used NOCH).
Firstly, make mixture of white glue and dirt. I made my own mixture of dry dirt I use for basing. Mixture should be thick, so add just few drops of water and you do that if mixture is really really thick. Why dirt? If you use just white glue it tends to get white after it dries. With dirt you should have more realistic base under bush.
Place drops of mixture on a piece of baking paper. Why baking paper? Because white glue easily peels off when dried.
Now, cut some hairs from that old brush. Hairs represents big branches of bush and should be thick. More hairs in a bunch is easier to handle, but you need just a few in a bunch - you want a bush that you can see through it (as in real life), so too much hairs will make very thick and not realistic bush.
Stick that hairs into mixture drops on baking paper. This is most difficult part of whole process and there you will see why mixture should be very thick. If mixture is thinner, hairs may fell down easily. Even with thick mixture some hairs may fell down so you'll need to raise them up before glue has dried. Also, longer hairs fall easier than short ones.
I need to improve that part of making "tufts" with brush hairs, but that will be for another tutorial (maybe some day). Until then, feel free to make more of them than you need because not all will be useful. White glue takes 4-6 hours to dry. Usually I leave it overnight. Then it looks like this:
Peel one off, trim (if needed), grab it with your tweezers and cover it with coat of hairspray. After that, just sprinkle it with some static grass and leave it to dry for about 10 minutes.
Finally, put new coat of hairspray and sprinkle it with leaves (scatter) that you have and seal it with another coat of hairspray. Et voila:
Now you can play with colors. Make dry bushes if you have arid or ocher static grass and scatter (you can use real dry leaves and grind them into small particles). I thought of using glue in spray can but hair spray holds nicely so I didn't need to spend my money on 2-3 times more expensive glue spray.
So, this is just how I do it. I'm not saying you can't do it better. But I hope some of you will find it useful. I just develop that yesterday and didn't have enough time to think how to make it better.
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