How to make artificial bonsai with your own hands. Do-it-yourself bonsai tree, from pine, ficus, artificial bonsai step by step. How to make bonsai from artificial and natural materials
Growing miniature trees, turning this process into an art, was invented by the ancient Japanese. Bonsai is a tree in a pot or is translated as "growing on a tray." Artificial bonsai is still popular today.
Usually, work on creating such a tree begins with the fact that they are looking for a good branch for the trunk. Sometimes a slowly growing plant acts as a branch, which, for example, no longer develops. In connection with the wrong growth conditions, the plant has acquired a not quite correct shape - thickening, irregularities, curvature. And these defects can, however paradoxical it sounds, be turned into art.
A certain container serves as a basis, which must be filled with clay, gypsum, even plasticine. In a word, something that will hold a mini-tree.
Artificial bonsai: history of origin (video)
How to make an artificial bonsai with your own hands: instructions step by step
Any master class begins with a list of materials and tools that will be needed in the work. If you take the standard guide, you get a kind of universal list of traditional bonsai.
Materials for making bonsai:
- Planter or plate (ceramic);
- A piece of driftwood or, alternatively, a three-wire wire;
- Gypsum;
- Glue gun;
- PVA glue;
- Acrylic paints for finishing decor;
- Artificial greenery divided into inflorescences.
For beginners, the best option is a tree with a small amount of materials and fairly simple instructions.
The Art of Bonsai: The Ultimate Guide
So, why three-wire wire? It is not always possible to find the right snag or branch, and the wire is malleable to manipulation. At one end, this wire needs to be stripped to get future branches.
Now you need to fix the barrel on a plate or in a flower pot. You will need a heat gun and hot glue.
After fixing, the entire structure is coated with PVA glue. Then you can start breeding gypsum.
Bonsai step by step:
- Dilute gypsum according to the instructions, adding to PVA, the solution should look like thick sour cream;
- The solution is applied to the frame of the tree, with its help form the structure of the trunk and branches;
- Leave the design to dry for a day;
- After a day with PVA glue, you need to grease the entire barrel back;
- When the glue dries well, it can be painted brown;
- Attention, the paint is also mixed with PVA glue (for three parts of paint, one part of glue);
- The paint is applied not with a brush, but with a sponge;
- Many craftsmen prefer to paint over the trunk with ocher as well;
- It dries all two hours, and then you can make a crown;
It's just a matter of the stand. Use the following way to decorate the stand: mix the same PVA glue and semolina in proportions of 2: 1, and add green paint there. This mixture is usually applied to the bottom of the plate with a cocktail spoon, beautiful irregularities are obtained.
Bonsai: how to make it (MK video)
How to make pine bonsai: decorate the site
Pine bonsai is garden bonsai. That is, a tree that will delight you not in the house, but on the site. This bonsai cannot be called completely artificial; nevertheless, real pine seedlings are taken. But there are a lot of manipulations, since you yourself regulate the growth and development of the plant.
The main stages of growing pine bonsai:
- Several pine seedlings should be provided with good drainage and lighting, and in the first year they should not be subjected to any special manipulations;
- In the second year, the seedlings are already cut to 12 cm, while the remaining shoot should have good needles that are not pruned;
- Pruning is done at the end of March, at an angle of 45 degrees.
Cropped plants will thicken. If the needles are too lush, it can be thinned out. Then a wire frame is superimposed on the seedling to give the plant the desired shape. When the wire cuts into the barrel, it will be removed.
Bonsai pine: planting seeds (video)
Do-it-yourself New Year's bonsai: skillful decor for the long-awaited holiday
New Year's bonsai - these are the same artificial leaves or needles, which is more appropriate, only snowy. The question is how to make snow. Take into service how other crafts “get out”. There may be snow from broken foam, snow from PVA glue and sea salt, beads, white sequins, etc.
But you can make a New Year tree in a different way: for example, create a bonsai from a money tree with your own hands. Since the money tree is grown for the sake of financial well-being, this will be the best wish in the New Year. Well, the New Year's atmosphere will be created by festive decor - tinsel, cones, decorations.
How to make a bonsai from plastic bottles: a piggy bank of ideas
And in this case, there are many variations on how to use plastic as a decor.
The two most common options:
- Leaves from plastic bottles. Leaves are cut out from a green bottle, which are melted over the flame, taking the desired shape. Many of these leaves form a crown.
- Squares from plastic bottles. Small squares or rectangles are cut, which subsequently need to be put on the wire. These pieces are also heat treated. The wire is folded in half, forming branches. Not a quick job, but you can also imitate a coniferous tree.
DIY bonsai in an aquarium
And you can put an artificial mini bonsai in the aquarium, which, by the way, looks healthy. An important step here is to choose a suitable snag. It has to be cooked.
Features of making bonsai in an aquarium:
- Take a whole bucket of water, throw in at least ten tablespoons of salt, put the water on fire;
- Throw a snag into this water;
- You need to cook a snag for five hours, and then keep it in a bucket of cold water for another two days;
- Plant the dried snag “head down” in a clay flower pot;
- Put several large stones around the formed trunk, pebbles and sand will also be needed;
- On the branches of a tree, you need to put Javanese moss disassembled into pieces, and you need to fix them carefully with a thin fishing line;
- At the very base of such a tree, you also need to put moss.
The tree can be placed in the center of the aquarium. There are instructions where all the manipulations are described in more detail, but a lot is thought out by the master himself right in the process. For example, you can make a mountain out of sand and pebbles right in the aquarium, where the tree will grow, it looks exotic and very Japanese.
Bonsai in the aquarium (video)
Bonsai is an oriental decor that has long been loved in our latitudes. Such a tree will decorate a greenhouse, living room, office, loggia. If you love Japanese culture, then a mini bonsai will harmoniously complement your bookshelf with volumes of Japanese authors.
Artificial bonsai (photo)
bonsai art
bonsai art is a very ancient art. This is a process of miniaturization of ordinary large trees planted in small flat containers. If you have read the post About, what is bonsai, you know that they are, in fact, dwarf prototypes of trees growing in nature, and have all the features inherent in their larger counterparts.
Not everyone can grow a real bonsai at home, but DIY decorative bonsai available to anyone who wants to. You can make a beautiful craft from corrugated (crepe) paper yourself by watching a short video tutorial (below). To make such a pretty dwarf tree, you will need very few materials. And the result is a magnificent work that can easily be confused with a living plant..
Materials for making paper bonsai:
2. Corrugated brown paper - 1 roll
3. Glue stick
4. Wire, wire cutters
5. Scissors
6. A piece of foam or plaster
7. Bonsai container
1. Cut a roll of green crepe paper without unfolding into equal pieces. Unwind each piece and cut to the middle into thin uniform strips, like needles. Lubricate the uncut part of the tape with glue.
2. From top to bottom in a spiral, wind the prepared tape onto the wire. The first branch is ready.
3. Gather together 3 branches. Larger branches are obtained from 3 small ones.
4. The brown paper roll must be cut into pieces, similar to the green crepe paper roll, but into thinner pieces. Expand the prepared piece and completely grease with glue.
5. Wrap the free ends of the collected branches with brown tape from top to bottom in a spiral. Carefully wrap the brown tape around the wire rod.
6. Formed branches should be lush. Be sure to form roots from the wire ends. Despite the fact that most of the roots will be hidden from view, they will give your tree more power and beauty. The trunk is thick at the base due to the fact that all the branches are connected in one place. The same brown crepe paper ribbon is wound on top.
7. The finished bonsai can be planted in a suitable container on the foam. Moreover, a bonsai can be woven even from a newspaper vine or a planter can be made from napkins. If there is no foam or similar material, then you can plant the tree in plaster, leaving some of the roots in sight.
8. Cover part of the roots in Styrofoam with shredded green crepe paper. This will create the illusion of moss. Dear readers, watch the entire manufacturing process in the video. Visualization will help you better understand this simple master class:
If you make an artificial bonsai with your own hands from branches of living plants that retain their decorative effect even when dried, it will be difficult to distinguish a tree from a real one.
In this master class with a photo, a small miracle is created from floristic wire and arborvitae twigs. Instead of thuja, you can use boxwood branches, then you get a deciduous bonsai. He looks amazing too. Put the craft in any place - such a tree does not require sunlight and painstaking care.
Materials for making a tree
Bonsai is a small compact tree that takes many years to form. Growing and shaping this is a painstaking and lengthy process, so the cost of an adult plant discourages many from buying it.
In order not to waste energy on growing or money to buy, make a realistic artificial bonsai from improvised materials.
For the floral lesson, prepare:
- secateurs;
- floral wire;
- teip tape dark brown;
- thuja twigs;
- toilet paper;
- a tube of PVA glue;
- round plastic container;
- gypsum;
- some water;
- black, brown and orange gouache;
- black acrylic;
- brush;
- pine bark;
- live lichen;
If you do not want to take live plants as a basis, buy artificial ones, but in this case there will be less similarity with a real mini-tree.
How to make bonsai from artificial and natural materials
Take a long floristic wire, thuja sprigs, secateurs and teip tape.
Twist two wires together. Use pruning shears to cut shorter branches from long branches.
Tape short branches to the ends of the wires with duct tape.
Proceed to the formation of the branches of the bonsai tree. Connect the two blanks together and wrap them with toilet paper.
Thanks to the paper, the artificial branch will become thicker.
Attach another wire, decorate everything with brown teip tape.
It should turn out to be such a beautiful branch.
The second branch of artificial bonsai will be without thuja. Take the floral wire and make a blank out of it, as shown in the photo.
Wrap it with the same paper.
Top with duct tape.
Connect the first and second branches together.
Form another third wire branch with thuja and attach it to the previously made bonsai blank from two branches.
To make the barrel thicker, wind many layers of toilet paper around the edge of the wires.
Hide it with tape. Get a tree with branches and a thick trunk.
An artificial tree needs a stand. It is not necessary to buy a ceramic or glass planter, you can take a not too high plastic container of any shape (round looks best).
Pour gypsum diluted with water into it, insert a tree in the center and wait a few minutes. During this time, the plaster should dry.
Form a bend in the branches, as if they were tilted by the wind. The trunk can also be bent to give the tree a fancy shape.
Bonsai is now sustainable!
The entire trunk and branches need to be pasted over with pieces of toilet paper, it will give a little texture.
This is what an artificial bonsai looks like at this stage of the master class.
Mix gouache of three colors (brown, black and orange), add some glue to the mixture.
Paint over the branches and trunk with the resulting paint.
Apply a layer of paint and plaster.
After drying, the gouache will become matte.
Cover the outer surface of the plastic container with 2-3 layers of dark-colored acrylic paint. In our case, it is black acrylic.
Coat the branches with PVA glue and sprinkle with small grains of pine bark.
Glue pieces of lichen on the bend of the trunk.
Glue the bark of a larger fraction, pieces of lichen and moss onto the surface of the gypsum. Leave everything to dry.
Bonsai is ready! He asks for at least a year or more.
Looks great, almost indistinguishable from a living plant! This tree will decorate any room.
The combination of artificial and natural materials is often used in. Check out our mixed media. For combined crafts, it is recommended to choose plants that remain decorative for a long time when cut.
A master class on making an artificial bonsai tree with your own hands, specially for the Women's Hobbies website, was prepared by Tatyana Ivanova, photo by the author.
Bonsai (We make small trees with our own hands). Master Class
It is very difficult to grow a real Bonsai. Here, as you understand, one desire is not enough! It takes time, opportunity, skill and ... years of hard work. It turns out, alas, not for everyone. But to decorate your interior with such a tree is available to many. The problem is solvable.
For fruitful work, it is necessary to stock up on various natural materials. Thus, we will solve two problems at once: financial and environmental. It is desirable to select snags for trunks that are clumsy, knotty, but if this is a problem, then simple twigs can also be used. It is important then to decorate all this beautifully.
Depending on the color scheme of the interior, the tree can also be summer or autumn...
This tree is made from several twigs of bedbug grass. It grows under every garage. The grass outwardly resembles a tree - a thin stem strewn with many twigs with small leaves. We take such stems of 5-6 pieces, glue them together in a bundle. Twigs with leaves form a luxurious crown. This grass dries quickly, but loses color. We paint the root with acrylic spray paint. There are a lot of them in car dealerships, in any color. We glue the trunk with a mass of sawdust and PVA glue. If there are no sawdust, tea is very convenient in this. We drink tea, any, then dry it on a newspaper. Great stuff to work with! If necessary, after drying, the trunk can be tinted. Gouache.
If there is not enough material, you can make a very tiny tree. True, it looks more like a toy.
What do we "plant" in... If you follow the traditions of Bonsai, then the dishes for the tree should be small, almost flat. Here we select from what is at hand. In this case, a can of herring. We decorate it with a mass of papier-mâché and paint it. It is convenient to do this immediately with colored varnish, it is available in hardware stores. You can replace it with a stain or gouache, but after drying, it will be necessary to treat the surface with a colorless varnish.
For this work, a bowl of disposable tableware was taken. It is thick and holds its shape well. It can be painted, pasted over with pebbles or shells, glass, etc.
A curved record looks good in such cases. It bends easily over a gas or electric stove. We put the plate on a nail with a large hat and hold it at a distance of 20-30 cm above a well-heated stove. When heated, the edges of the plate sag and at this moment they can be given almost any shape. Be careful, the plate gets very hot, use gloves!
Now about how we fix the tree and how ... If the snag has processes, like roots, great! If there are none, it is also not a tragedy. We just decorate differently. To secure the barrel, you can use mounting foam. Gypsum or alabaster is also very convenient in this case. The material is relatively cheap and economical. The cement is not suitable. It's very hard work. It's useless.
Since I use gypsum for my work, I will talk about it. For such trees, as in my photos (height up to 30 cm, no more: from the bottom of the bowl to the top of the crown), 1.5-2 cups of dry gypsum is enough. Divide dry plaster into two parts. Make one bigger, the other, respectively, smaller. The bowls and wood should be ready. Wood assembled and painted. The bowl is decorated. Put a few pebbles on the bottom of the bowl to counterbalance. This is just in case, for better tree stability. Install the tree trunk in the bowl as you plan. Dilute most of the gypsum in salted water. Salted water allows the plaster to thicken and harden quickly, so you need to work at a pace. Fill the bowl with wood to 2/3 of the depth of the bowl. Hold the stem for a few minutes. The plaster will set quickly. The bowl will become warm, do not be alarmed. Gypsum during hardening, heats up. As soon as the trunk is fixed, we proceed to the main decor.
By the main decor, I mean the final decoration of the "land" for bonsai. Nature is infinitely generous, so leaving the "earth" naked is ridiculous. We create the illusion of abundance, lush vegetation. It's easy. All sorts of small snags, stones, dry inflorescences of herbs ... We take the remaining dry gypsum. We breed it, but already with plain cold water, without salt. Now we will not benefit from its rapid thickening. Pour it over the already hardened gypsum. As soon as this mass begins to thicken, fill it with everything that you have stored up as vegetation. Scatter pebbles, stick in snags, grass, moss. The plaster will harden and everything will be fixed. After the gypsum has completely hardened, spray the surface with the remaining aerosol paints. Light and dark green, yellow, black. These are colors that are suitable for painting the surface of the "earth" and herbs.
Stones and grass.
This same snag is larger.
We fill the surface of the "earth" more abundantly, then the work really resembles a small corner of nature.
In winter, more than at any other time of the year, any green objects delight the eye. Especially if these items resemble a warm summer. Therefore, my daughter asked me to purchase a bonsai tree. I, of course, did not agree. In addition to the fact that a real adult bonsai tree is infinitely expensive, neither I nor she know how to care for this unusual plant. Of course, you can find articles on the Internet on growing and caring for these dwarf trees, but I think this will not help much.
Without practical skills, the plant will simply constantly get sick and drop foxes. After all, caring for bonsai, in the homeland of these plants, in Southeast Asia, is a whole doctrine, and even a way of life. I have seen this before, with friends - everything seemed to be done correctly. They maintained the right temperature, cut it, fed it with special fertilizers for this species, and even bought a small steam humidifier especially for it, but the tree was constantly sick, bald and stunted. Of course, there could be no talk of any flowering. I think that, unfortunately, these beautiful plants are simply not physically able to fully grow and please the eye in our northern latitudes, where I live. Therefore, I decided not to throw away a lot of money, but to try to make something similar, only inanimate. Artificial. Which is not so demanding and capricious. After watching a few short videos about these trees on the Internet and studying them visually, I got down to business.
It will take
- Wire (1mm thick and 2 meters long).
- PVA glue.
- Tobacco dust.
- Foam sponge.
- Watercolors or gouache.
- Vessel with low sides.
- Sand or earth.
- Universal glue (you can "Moment").
- Pliers (2 pieces).
- Nippers or scissors (for cutting wire).
- The third hand from the soldering kit.
- Glue brush.
Making a bonsai tree
First, let's prepare the wire.
It is better, if possible, to straighten it so that it is more convenient to fold it in the future. And we will fold it based on the desired growth of the tree. For example, I chose 15 cm. We measure 15 cm from the beginning of the wire, and bend it 180 degrees. We continue to bend like this until the wire runs out. It will turn out like this:
Now we clamp one end of the skein with pliers, and with the second pliers we take the other end of the skein, and twist the skein into a bundle.
Not too tight. So that you can branch two or three cores into separate branches. First, we branch the thickest branches to the middle - three or four strands of wire each.
We twist them so that they do not fall apart.
We bite off the bent ends from their tops, and divide the resulting branches into several more separate branches along the entire length.
In general, we improvise, we give this wire harness any shape of the tree you like. You can give the shape of a slender pine, or spreading maple.
With the branches finished, now let's take care of the roots. There, in principle, everything is exactly the same, only we make the branches much shorter. It should turn out something like this:
We received the “skeleton” of the tree, now we need to cover it with “bark” and “leaves”. To imitate the bark, I used tobacco dust, which I had left over from the summer, after fighting garden aphids. It is also sold at any hardware store. You will also need PVA glue.
We apply glue with a brush to the entire surface of the future tree, and immediately sprinkle it with tobacco dust.
Once, of course, is not enough. After the glue dries (20-30 min.), repeat the procedure 3-4 times. Until all visible wire is hidden under the bark on the entire surface of the trunk and branches. We put it closer to the heating radiator (where it is warmer), and leave it to dry until the next morning. In the meantime, the tree dries, you can do the foliage. To do this, you need to finely (as finely as possible!) Pick up a foam rubber sponge.
Do not cut with scissors, but tear into small pieces so that the shape of the pieces is involuntary and varied. The more magnificent you want the crown of the tree, the more sponges you need to pick. Pour the torn pieces into a bowl, or a small bowl, dilute a thick green concentrate (about a tablespoon) from watercolor or gouache, pour it into a bowl with a torn sponge and mix thoroughly with a stick, spoon, or hands.
When the sponge is evenly colored, pour it onto some clean surface and, in the same way, leave it to dry until the morning.
Now it's the turn of the dishes in which the tree will "grow". It is desirable if it is a round or oval container with low sides. We pour earth into it, moisten it, form a bulge in the middle, such as a hill.
Pour on the whole thing from above 3-4 tbsp. tablespoons of PVA glue and smear it all over the ground so that in the future the mound does not settle and lose its shape. Sprinkle dry sand on top (can be mixed with crushed dry leaves), and also put in a warm place until morning.
In the morning we check the tree so that there is no bare wire left on it.
If everything is fine, we try it on the finished dishes with earth and mark with protruding roots the place where it will be in the future.
In my opinion, the work done is worth the effort and time spent - from the outside, the tree looks very lively and natural. It can only be distinguished from the real one upon closer inspection. In general, the daughter got what she wanted, and I avoided unnecessary expenses and the hassle of caring for a capricious living tree.
Watch the video