What colour is a tree trunk?

Brown! everybody knows that a tree trunk is brown! end of story! or is it?

The question "What colour is a tree trunk?" is more about modelling as a whole than a debate about tree trunks, and the point to be suggested is that what we have learnt and adopted as unquestionable fact since the days of painting lolly-pop trees when we were knee high to a grass hopper may not be quite so relevant when trying to scale the real world down to 00 gauge.

This is because colour and light do strange things when they travel any distance, grassy hills become more pastel in appearance, the sun becomes redder when its setting and tree trunks become grey! The proof of this lies in a quick Internet search for images of tree trunks (we know, we have too much time on our hands), you will be surprised at just how many grey trees there are that no one knew where grey!

The lesson to be learnt here is not to get the paint out and repaint all of your trees grey. In reality a tree trunk's colour is made up from hundreds of different colours that even the most accomplished modellers would struggle to incorporate into a model, but it is a good idea to really take a good hard look at somethings true colours before we attempt to model it.