Hi Feanorthenoldor!
I turned your problem to my friends in the Italian forum of Il Sito dell'Anello and here are the suggestions they gave me for you by now:
ALBIONE: From what I think I understand, he wants advice on how to do the base terrain of a diorama were to place the army (in WotR style)?
Well I would make a dominance of various types of green herbs interspersed with some rocky outcrop!
The leaves on the ground would imply that I am due to the trees ... is it plausible as a thing?
ME: Well, why not? Laurelin and Telperion had life intense to paroxysm, seeing that they flourished once a day and overflowed with light; it's nice to think that even the beautiful leaves would change a lot. So: green lawn with some rocks, covered with golden and silver leaves that are concentrated under their trees and fade closer to the soldiers, right?
GANJALF: Maybe it's a strange idea, but in Gdańsk many jewelers are specialized in creating lamps and decorative trees interweaving precious metals and using amber like leaves, reading the history of Valinor and the magical shining "silmarillian" fruits I immediately thought of these pieces of furniture luxury.
I have something like 2 kg of amber collected within 20 years and in addition to scraping and polishing a little every now and then I do not do much with it, try to do something similar was in my plans in the distant future, making the trunk of the tree with realistic modeling techniques - we say certainly not gold.
Another very difficult thing to do would be to make a system with mini-LEDs placed inside a small recess in the single pieces, but you must have expensive precision instruments given the fragility.
The lights and the shades naturally present in the hardened resin are amazing, I can think of nothing more suitable to recreate the magical fruits of the golden tree.
If you want to tell him that he could contact any specialized shop and agree for about fifty grams of small pieces with high transparency, those not suitable for jewelry, then if he could easily polish them on their own (already polished they cost a lot more):
http://www.google.it/search?biw=1366&bi ... cQ#imgrc=_ME: But it's fantastic an idea! And the minileds, I add, seem really the Egg of Columbus: the light of flowers should not be missing, and what better solution than this?
But amber, while brilliantly solving a problem, opens another one, because there are two trees: how to make the silvery leaves of Telperion so that it stands comparison? Is there an easy way to get nice silver flakes, for example?