I was wandering around for some leaves for a diorama and saw a snow flake hole punch in Michaels Crafts.
noticed that if I cut the "wings" from the center point of the snow flake it looks like an oak leaf. If I cut that in 1/2 it looks like a trident maple leaf. I got home and took some real leaves from the lawn and cut myself some snowflakes. Then I tried it with my kid's construction paper. While the real leaves look best the paper ones aren't that bad especially when they are dusted with a little weather powders.
I think the 5/8 snowflakes are a little too small for 1:6 scale figures. But they should work for smaller scales.
Obviously if you want a ton of leaves you'd prolly go mad first. But for a few I think it fits the bill. HTH.
If you look around, you can find one of those scrapbooking punches in a maple leaf pattern. They are just about right for larger leaves in 1/6. MIchael Fichtenmayer used those kinds of leaves in the groundwork on his Industria Mechanika Frankenstein's Monster build-up.
I needed some maple leaves in 1/24 scale... so I cut them from kitchen foil on my Silhouette Cameo desktop cutter:
I literally just bought a leaf stamp last week. This thing is great. It is called Creative Memories Leaf Maker Punch and it has two different leaves in one stamp: a maple leaf and an oak leaf. They retailed at $17 but you can get these for as little as $6 on eBay and I won a lightly used one last week for 99 cents (which had to have ticked off that seller). The leaves are an inch long and are about the size of a hand of a 1/6 scale kit.
It is a very nice quality punch with die cast steel and it feels very sturdy so this is not a cheap plastic feeling piece of junk, it is used by serious scrapbookers and it punches out crisp leaves every time. I was in the market for one to punch leaves to add to that Reel Resin Dracula AD diorama that has Helsing pushing the carriage wheel spoke into Dracula's chest.
After experimenting with different papers I found that if you punch the leaves out using that baking parchment paper you can wrinkle the leaves up a little so they look a little more natural and don't have as much of that flat pressed out form to them. I wrinkle the paper up first, die the paper to the color I want shading them with more than one color then punch the leaves out. Nice thing about using this paper is the colors do not completely color the paper solid so the leaves have sort of an opaque look to them so that factor adds to the realism too. When you slightly wrinkle up this paper it sort of gives off a veiny appearance too.
When I get some free time I will try and post some pictures here.
monkey5150 wrote:looks cool, how did you ever notice that it would work???
I really went to the craft store, which is a pretty decent drive away, for a leaf shaped cutter. When there were none the size I wanted, I wasn't leaving empty handed, thats when I noticed the lobes of the snowflake sorta looked like an oak leaf
Bigmick wrote:This range of diorama accessories has just become available in the UK, I'm not sure about the US.
The dried leaves are pretty incredible.
a great tip ... and to think all this time I've been sculpting every leaf ... lol
thanks so much for this tip
rich
Come over to www.themadmonstermaker.com and see the wonderful pieces of art I have. It doesn't take a penny to look and enjoy, and who knows ... You might fight something that suited just for you.
I just discovered that Amazon has these punches. If you enter "punch bunch punches" in the search box you will come up with all types of different leaves, ferns etc. The best part is they come in different sizes. The small is said to be approx 5/8" possibly good for 1:6 scale. There are about 3-5 different sizes for each pattern. It beats running around to various craft stores.
