Scenic leaves cover two different jobs: a scattered layer of forest floor, and individual leaves placed with tweezers. There is crushed leaf litter in green and autumn shades, short flock two millimetres long, coloured oak leaves, maple leaves in semi-latex, palm and banana fronds in 1:35, laser-cut vines and decal sheets of autumn foliage.
How to distribute leaves so they do not lie like a carpet, and why the darkest shade goes down first, is described further down.
Scattered leaves make an area: a forest floor, a drift against a wall, a layer in a cutting. They are handled like scatter, which means onto glue and in several passes. Individual leaves, by contrast, are foreground detail. Pressed pieces in semi-latex, laser-cut shapes and photo-etched brass have the right outline and venation, so the eye reads them as a specific plant - maple, palm, banana, ivy. Between the two sits the decal version, used on flat surfaces where a layer of material would not hold.
The wind blows them against obstacles. Most of them will therefore be at a wall, in a corner, under a tree, in the lee of a vehicle and in hollows. The middle of an open area will be nearly bare. Observe that and a scene gains credibility at once, even if the material itself is ordinary.
The uppermost leaves are the lightest and most colourful; the layer beneath darkens towards brown and grey. Start scattering with the dark shade, fix it, and only then add a few lighter and more colourful pieces on top. The other order gives you an area that looks like spilled confetti.
Pressed and laser-cut leaves are painted on both sides first, ideally by airbrush, then bent over a fingernail or a rod so they are not flat. Fix them with cyanoacrylate taken from a drop on film and picked up on the tip of a cocktail stick. One well-placed leaf at the foot of a plant does more than a handful of scattered crumb.
Leaves are one of the few materials where it pays to be generous in the corners and mean in the middle. Keep to that and fill in the rest of the forest floor from scenic accessories.
