Well, after a three week hiatus (even scale model builders get married sometimes), here’s a quick post on weathering.

There are several options and many products for making leaves. They can be used anywhere: on dioramas, and even on individual vehicles. They are great and subtle way to increase the level of realism: a brown, crumpled leaf on the floor of a vehicle, or stuck between tool boxes make a model look more real.

There are punch-sets (pretty good ones), PE and amazing laser cut, and other aftermarket sets, but there’s a free, and pretty convincing alternative, too, courtesy of the common birch.

From wikipedia:

The flowers are monoecious, opening with or before the leaves and borne once fully grown these leaves are usually 3–6 millimetres (0.12–0.24 in) long on three-flowered clusters in the axils of the scales of drooping or erect catkins or aments. Staminate aments are pendulous, clustered or solitary in the axils of the last leaves of the branch of the year or near the ends of the short lateral branchlets of the year. They form in early autumn and remain rigid during the winter. The scales of the staminate aments when mature are broadly ovate, rounded, yellow or orange color below the middle, dark chestnut brown at apex. Each scale bears two bractlets and three sterile flowers, each flower consisting of a sessile, membranaceous, usually two-lobed, calyx. Each calyx bears four short filaments with one-celled anthers or strictly, two filaments divided into two branches, each bearing a half-anther. Anther cells open longitudinally. The pistillate aments are erect or pendulous, solitary; terminal on the two-leaved lateral spur-like branchlets of the year. The pistillate scales are oblong-ovate, three-lobed, pale yellow green often tinged with red, becoming brown at maturity. These scales bear two or three fertile flowers, each flower consisting of a naked ovary. The ovary is compressed, two-celled, and crowned with two slender styles; the ovule is solitary. Each scale bear a single small, winged nut that is oval, with two persistent stigmas at the apex.

There was a reason I hated plant taxonomy at university. Anyhow, it boils down to the following: some parts of the seed pods (not a scientifically correct name) look like maple leaves.

Mix some white glue with water, and use it to attach these to the surface of the model (or diorama); the seeds themselves can be mixed with this glue, and used as amorphous plant deposits in crevices.

The effect is pretty convincing, and if you live in a country where the tree grows, it’s free. I’ve been using this on the T-62, the Zrinyi II, the D7 dozer I’ve made, and in general, most 1/35 models I’ve been building lately. The one downside is obvious- it looks like my models live in a very uniform forest populated by a single tree; so I’ll be buying some punch sets in the future, that’s for sure.