Things don't always go to plan

Just to prove that things don't always go smoothly on my projects.

It's autumn/fall here in Minnesota and the trees are starting to look magnificent in all their colours, and that set me thinking about the trees on this little creation of mine. I should set the layout in the autumn to take advantage of these colours. 

Strangely, I never really appreciated autumn colours growing up in England. Now, I seem to have become attuned to the slightest variations in colour and shape, and the way the trees loose their leaves. Most modellers are content to slap orange and yellow clump foliage on tree armatures and call it good, when in reality it's so much more subtle than that. 

Leaves don't change colour all at once patches appear in spots while the majority of the tree remains green. The way the trees loose their foliage is not even either a random section of a tree can loose its leaves while the remaining foliage remains green. I felt the need to reflect all this variety in this layout.

But how to do this? Before I went searching for varying oranges, yellows and browns of leaf foliage, I thought about making my own by taking some Woodland Scenics fine leaf foliage and colouring it by soaking it in acrylics.

Before the start

I mixed up some washes of yellows, reds and browns, then mixed the red and yellow to make an orange. Initially, I thought things were going really well. But then as the paper towels started to soak up the paint, the colours began to look less and less impressive, and by the time the foliage had dried out fully, I had decided this was not an option. The yellow colour doesn't look too bad, its the best of the lot. The other colours however were a real failure.

The end result. Not what I had hoped for.

So I guess it's off to the internet to find some other colours.