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| Ponderosa Pine 5x8 gouache |
I tell my students that painting trees from life usually ends up being a drawing exercise. In order to capture the true personality of a tree, you have to pay a lot of attention to the drawing. This involves measuring angles and proportions and, quite often, re-measuring and re-drawing. Many times, when I go out to paint a tree, I end up spending nearly all my mental energy on drawing—and leaving the rest of the painting unfinished or just blocked in. Exhausted, I find it hard to do much more.
Without focusing on drawing, you'll end up with a generic-looking tree, like something you'd see in a cartoon. But this is sometimes what painters do, especially if they are still learning. Imagine if they were to paint a portrait of a person the same way they paint trees! Think of painting a tree as painting a portrait of that tree—the drawing has to be that exact.
If you find your tree skills to be lacking, I recommend you put away the paints and pull out the pencil. Paint just gets in the way when you're trying to learn how to draw a tree. When you get good enough to pick up the paint again, if the tree is your focus, leave the background and other unimportant areas abstract or understated.
Drawing trees will not only improve your drawing skills, but it will also teach you about simplifying what you see before you. I like to paint old, scraggly trees that are either dead snags or on the brink of becoming such. They are often a terrifyingly confused tangle of branches and twigs. But drawing all of that daunting complexity will not necessarily capture the tree's personality, and it will burden the finished work. Instead, I try to mentally prune the excess and leave only that which best suggests the character of the tree. This is a skill worth learning, and you can apply it to other subjects.
I took a break after finishing Pandemic Sketchbooks, Vol. 1, but now I am back in the canyon behind my studios most days working on Vol. 2. The first volume, as you recall, focused on rocks; this new volume is all about trees. As with the earlier sketchbook, I am working in gouache. I'm finding it very helpful to think of my brush (a small pointed one) as a drawing tool. I first draw my trees with the brush in grey and note shadow areas with the same. Then I go back with color. I've included some finished examples here.
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| Juniper, 5x8 gouache |
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| Juniper, 5x8 gouache |
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| Juniper, 5x8 gouache |
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| Fallen snag, 5x8 gouache |
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| Juniper, 8x5 gouache |
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| This shows you the simplification necessary to paint some trees. On the left is a reference photo of the tree I painted from life on the right. Yes, I took some liberties with proportions -- all in the interest of adding even more character to the tree! But look how I simplified it. |
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| Pinyon, 8x5 gouache |
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| Juniper, 5x8 gouache |
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| Juniper, 5x8 gouache |
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| Pinyon, 8x5 gouache |
