How to Draw and Paint a Realistic Tree
Today I wanted to spend a few minutes sharing with you an easy how-to tutorial for painting realistic tree trunks with a lot texture.
In this post you will learn one of my favorite techniques for painting realistic tree trunks with oil paints. I will explain step by step along with showing you photos of each step so that the process will be super easy to learn. So go ahead and pull out your paints and paint along with me!
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Painting Realistic Tree Trunks
All you will need a filbert brush, palette knife, and some moderately thick (dry) oil paints.
My favorite oil painting brand to use is Gamblin. They have great pigment, are nicely thick, and are all around a pleasure to paint with.
Step 1:
First let's mix up some real dark color. I took a little burnt umber, ivory black, and a brown color I made by pre-mixing sap green and alizarin red in equal parts. The color choice is up to you. I chose these colors because they go well with the overall tone of the painting I painted for this blog post.
Now that we've got a good strong dark color mixed, let's load a filbert brush full of our dark color, like so.
Now that our brush is loaded full of color, let's drop in a basic tree trunk shape. It's usually better to make the base of the trunk a little wider than the top. Trees are typically more narrow in nature at the top.
Step 2.
Okay, now that we've dropped in our basic shape. Let's determine where our light source is coming from. In this particular painting, my light source is coming from the right of my tree.
Now let's mix up a light color. I took a little white, burnt sienna, and a touch of that brown color I made by mixing sap green and alizarin red together. I like to mix my color so that it's somewhat marbled, not flat and dull.
Now that we've got our color mixed, let's load the long edge of our palette knife with that light color. Okay, now let's go to the edge of our tree on the side that the light is coming from and give the knife a little pull towards the center of the tree. I like to go about half way to the center of the trunk. We'll do this all the way up the entire length of the trunk.
Okay, good. Now let's do the same thing to the other side of the tree except this time we'll be using that same dark color we made when we used the filbert brush to draw our basic trunk shape.
Step 3.
Alright! So far so good. Now time for the fun part.
With a clean palette knife, use the long edge of the blade and touch the tree trunk on the light side and lift. The edge of the blade should be parallel to the canvas while holding the knife at about a 20 to 30 degree angle. We will do this repeatedly all the way up the entire trunk only in the light area for now.
It's very important to not allow the knife to slide or turn once it's made contact with the canvas. Just touch and lift straight off. Basically we are causing the paint to "smush" out away from the edge of the blade when we press on the canvas.
Because we've built up a nice layer of paint, the paint will have nice little troughs or grooves where the blade touches the canvas. Here in this photo, you can see what the tree looks like after my first two touches.
Here you can see how it looks after several more touches.
After we are finished on the light side, let's wipe off the knife and repeat this step on the dark side. Remember to start at the edge of the tree and work towards the center, working up the entire length of the tree.
Now with a clean knife, I'll start back on the light side and this time I'll work all the way across the entire width of the trunk. This is so that our two colors will begin to blend in the center of the trunk and give us a very nice mid-tone.
Your tree should look something like this.
Step 4.
Now time for the final highlights and shadows.
For my highlight color, I took mostly titanium white with a touch of our original light color we made for step 2. With our highlight color, load the tiniest little amount of color on the edge of the blade. Now let's go to our tree trunk. Lightly touch the very edge of the trunk in the areas you'd like to show a little highlight. It's very easy to over do this part. Notice there's barely any highlight on my tree. It's so easy to put too much.
Now let's do the same for our shadow side. In this particular painting I used straight black. You use whatever color you'd like for your painting though. A light blue color works wonderfully for showing a little bit of reflected light. I chose black because I didn't want any blue in this painting.
The finished tree trunk should look something like this.
Now all that's left is to add a few limbs and branches with a liner brush and you'll have one fantastic tree. Thanks for reading this post. I had a lot of fun sharing my secret way of painting realistic tree trunks. I hope you enjoyed it and had fun painting along with me! Have a great day!
Don't forget to pin this for later!
Source: https://paintpaintings.com/4-easy-steps-for-painting-realistic-tree-trunks/