Art Lesson #39: More Little Trees

A bit more realism this time!

Welcome back to our multi-part series on painting trees! The lessons you learn here will serve you well for all sorts of greenery and landscape paintings, but they’re all just good foundational drawing and painting techniques. But also…TREES! Who doesn’t love a tree?

Here’s what we’ve done so far, if you want to catch up:

Part One: Mixing greens

Part Two: Tiny trees

Before we move on to bigger trees…

We’re going to take a beat and experiment with some more detailed, slightly more realistic small trees. This is good practice: it allows you to do lots of trees at once and try out these techniques without feeling terribly invested in how any particular tree turns out. This is the version we’ll be scaling up to larger trees next week.

This is so essential when you’re learning how to draw or paint: Make lots of stuff! Work in multiples! Fill page after page of a sketchbooks, or get one big sheet of paper, divide it up, and do several small paintings at once.

I can’t find his exact quote, but the …