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Microscale Tree Mini-tutorial

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Microscale Tree Mini-tutorial

This is a short tutorial showcasing a technique for building microscale trees. This technique was used to build most of the trees in my MOC Avalonian Countryside.

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The pieces needed are shown above. The centerpiece of the tree is the 6 stemmed plant piece (19119) which is essential for the design. The rest of the pieces are pretty standard, and some can be exchanged for other pieces.

As seen on the 1x2 plate in the lower right, the plates need to have a little hole in the center column, as this will be attached to the stems. I believe the hole is pretty standard in pieces nowadays, but not sure for older pieces.

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First we put together the trunk. Nothing strange here, just attach the 1x1 round bricks to the telescope and put the plant piece on top.

For the canopy we construct little building blocks that we will then hang on the stalks. These building blocks are easily constructed from 1x2 plates and a 2x2 plate as shown in the top right. We need three of these.

We then proceed to hang these on the tree. They should hang on the 3 lower stems that are more horizontal. After hanging each part we will then secure it by attaching another 1x2 plate directly to the stem. This is done by inserting the stem into the little hole on the center column at the bottom of the plate.

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Our tree should now look as on the left. The next step is to add 1x2 plates to the top of the tree. These are again attached directly to the stems. I find they look best if placed in a kind of windmill pattern as shown in the center picture.

We now have our completed tree as shown on the right.

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If all our trees look exactly the same, it won't look natural. So let's look at some modifications that can be made to break the pattern. Some of these modifications can also help if you are short on certain parts, or want to use colors that doesn't have certain elements.

First some variations of the trunk. Instead of the standard telescope trunk, we could use technic connectors. It gives a thicker, straighter trunk, but is a bit more complicated to connect to your build. Another option is to use a regular bar, which gives a very thin trunk. We can also just use straight up 1x1 round bricks, and possibly mix in some 1x1 round plates in the mix. This works well if we want to do a tree with shifting colors, like a birch or similar.

There are also endless possibilities to modify the canopy. Instead of building an anchor shape from 1x2 plates we can more round plates as in the top left. For colors like olive green we can't use a 2x2 round plate, but can instead use a 3x4 leaf element. The leaf is then hung from the top right hole of the leaf element. We can also just alter the orientation of the regular design, as shown in the bottom left, where we have put the anchor shape on the right side. It is a very small change, but still helps break the pattern.

Also just want to point out that the 6 stem piece does come in different colors, so if you are building a canopy in dark orange, you may want to use a 6 stem piece in dark orange as well, as the green can sometimes be seen through the canopy.

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Some examples of what the finished trees may look like.

There are lots of other ways to build trees like this, so just go ahead and try different things. If you lack a piece for something, just try replacing it with something else. It might just end up even better :)

Happy building!

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