You may have spent ages perfecting the shadow your tree is casting on the ground, but what about the shadows the branches and leaves cast on the tree itself?
Common Mistakes When Painting Trees
Marion Boddy-Evans is an artist living on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. She has written for art magazines blogs, edited how-to art titles, and co-authored travel books.
Updated on 03/19/18
Trees come in all shapes and sizes, colors and heights. Even two trees of the same species are not identical, although from a distance they may seem very similar. When you are painting trees it is important to envision branches of varying lengths growing in different directions. Think about the bumps and scars on the bark and the subtle variations of hues for the leaves.
When a tree is part of your landscape or even if it is the star of your painting, think about the changing light and shadow throughout the day caused by the sun’s movement. Keep in mind the constantly changing weather conditions, and transitions through the seasons.
When done right, trees are an exciting, dynamic element. If you ignore these unique qualities of trees, then your trees may just ruin your paintings or give your work a non-realistic feel. Review some common mistakes you should avoid when including trees in your artwork.
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Use More Than One Green for the Leaves
The leaves on the tree you intend to paint may be green, but it can be a big mistake to use only one green for the landscaping and expect your painting to look realistic.
Sure, you may think that by adding a little white to create a lighter green or black to create a darker green, that you’ve handled shade or brightness, but that is inadequate.
You should dig into your paintbox for a yellow and a blue. Mix each of these in with your green to create variations. You can use the yellow/green mixes when the sunlight is falling, and the blue/green for shadowy parts. You can mix quite a variety of useful greens for the landscape by using blues and yellows.
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Do Not Use One Brown For the Trunk
Like the green for the landscape and leaves, the same applies to the brown of the tree trunk. It will not do to just have one brown for the whole trunk, mixed with white for lighter areas and black for darker. If you are struggling, you can use a recipe for painting a tree and its trunk. Part of the recipe calls for mixing some of your greens, blues, yellows, even red into your “tube brown” mixture to echo the variations in color and the tones from the bark.
Also important, check whether the bark on the species you are painting brown or not. Get outside. Look at the tree. Look at it from different angles and at different times of the day. You might find during personal observation that the bark doesn’t even appear brown at all.
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How to Paint a Snow-Covered Evergreen Tree – Technique #1
It’s been snowing and blowing for weeks here in western Pennsylvania, with temperatures below zero some nights and highs in the teens. What better time, then, to paint snow-covered evergreens?
I have two different techniques for painting snow on evergreen trees. Here’s a condensed version of the instructions for Technique #1 – click to enlarge it. (I’ll post Technique #2 tomorrow.)
Before we get into painting the tree, let’s talk about some color-mixing options for those cool blue shadows that we see on snow.
Snow shadows can range from pure Cobalt Blue to a duller gray-blue or violet. They can even have multiple colors of reflected light in them. But for our purposes, let’s keep things fairly simple and play around with some basic shadow color mixes like these:
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| Cobalt Blue + Permanent Alizarin Crimson combine to make a beautiful violet |
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| Ultramarine Blue + Rose Violet (or Permanent Rose or Quinacridone Rose) |
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| Thalo (Pthalo) Blue + Permanent Alizarin |
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| Instead of a red, try mixing Burnt Sienna with a blue like Cobalt |
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| Ultramarine Blue + Payne’s Gray is a default shadow mixture for me |
When painting a snow scene, you’ll have a range of shadow values. The deep blue-gray and purple shadow colors I mixed above would be diluted to make more subtle shadows that are lighter in value.
Okay, let’s start on our evergreen…
1 – Lightly draw the evergreen tree with a pencil, blocking in shapes that represent individual branches covered with snow. There’s no need to separate the snow layer from the green branches at this point.
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| 1 – Pencil drawing |
2 – Wet the sky with clean water. Mix up a generous puddle of paint for the sky. Color choices are up to you – it could be a sunny Cerulean Blue sky or a stormy blue-gray with touches of purple in it. Brush paint onto the sky area, making a graded wash that is darker at the top and gradually gets lighter toward the horizon. If you’d like to suggest snowflakes in the sky, drop a few crystals of kosher salt into the sky wash while it’s still wet. (Kosher salt is easier to handle than table salt, because of its larger crystals.) Let the sky dry thoroughly, then brush off the salt.
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| 2 – Paint the sky and distant trees |
Paint distant trees in the background. If you paint them while the sky is still wet, the trees will have soft edges and look out-of-focus. If the trees are painted on dry paper, the top edge of the treeline will be more defined. In any case, keep detail to a minimum – our focus is on the evergreen in the foreground.
3 – Begin painting shadows on the clumps of snow that cover the branches. Use light to medium values, and vary the colors, if you like, incorporating pink, blue and lavender tones.
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| 3 – Paint first shadow washes (I used Cobalt Blue + Permanent Alizarin for the shadows in this example) |
4 – Paint darker shadows in the deepest recesses of the tree branches and cast shadows where an upper branch shades a lower one. Our tree now appears to be completely covered with rounded clumps of snow.
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| 4 – Add darker shadows (I used Cobalt + Permanent Rose for the shadows in this example) |
In my example, I painted rolling, hilly terrain in the background behind the trees. To do this, lay down a stroke of paint on dry paper, indicating the top of a hill, then immediately rinse your brush and blot excess water from it. (The brush should be very damp, wet but not drippy.) Drag the damp brush along the upper edge of the brush stroke to soften the edge and feather out the paint. Repeat the rinsing, blotting, and dragging until you’ve diluted the edge of the paint so much that there’s nothing there but clear water. This will give you a soft-edged shadow, as shown on the hills below.
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| Paint background terrain |
5 – Now it’s time to add some greenery to our tree. If the snow is heavy and thick, there will be very little green showing. If it’s a light coating, you’ll see more of the branches. In my sketch, the branches are heavily laden with snow with just a small amount of greenery peeking out. I used a size 4 round brush loaded with light and medium values of green to paint the pine needles on this 3″ tall tree. (I’ll cover how to mix evergreen colors in tomorrow’s post, “How to Paint a Snow-Covered Evergreen Tree – Technique #2”.) The greens on the sunny side of the tree have more yellow in them, and the ones on the shady side are bluer.
Paint the needles as irregular linear masses at the bottom edge of each clump of snow, extending down onto the snow-covered branch below. Vary the size of the needle sections – some branches will have more green peeking out from under the snow, others less. Be sure the direction of your brushstrokes makes sense and follows the way the tree grows.
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| 5 – Begin painting greenery (I used Pthalo Blue + Permnanent Alizarin for the shadows in this example) |
6 – It’s finally time for the finishing touches. Evaluate the tree – is there enough value contrast? It’s important to have bright highlights and deep, dark shaded areas. That’s what makes a scene appear sunlit. In my example, I added touches of very dark green foliage and some deeper shadows on the snow-covered branches. I also painted the shadow cast by the tree on the snowy ground.
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| 6 – Paint darkest values |
Note: When I wrote this lesson for a watercolor class a few years ago, I drew and painted six separate trees on one page, so I could show my students the details of each step in the painting process. If you compare them, you’ll see that they vary slightly from each other – don’t let that confuse you if you want to try painting along with this tutorial.
Tomorrow I’ll show you another technique for painting snow-covered evergreens. Try them both, and see which one you prefer!
Find more step-by-step watercolor tutorials on the “Tutorials” page of the Everyday Artist blog.
