Landscapes: Trees and other green things

 Trees in landscapes

Two years ago I did a blog on making trees. Here is the blog:

https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/8812132386157895665/1185336914084288288

It includes several tutorials from Paul Clark, one from Karen Rice, and one from Eric Yi Lin.

Rather than repeat myself, I am only going to add the methods I have tried since then.

This first one is described by Paul Clark. It is dry brushed. 

To dry brush, you saturate the brush in paint, tap off some of the moisture, and holding the brush with the belly on its side, brush lightly across the cold press or texture of the paper. It doesn't work well on hot press. Lay in yellows (or lights) first, leaving open spaces of white. Then do the same for greens and again for darks, shadows. When it is dry you can paint the trunk and branches. Paul often uses the sharpened end of a wood paint brush to drag in small branches, but this takes practice. Karen Rice does the same thing with sharpened sticks.. Altho I love the look, I still have not mastered it myself. 

Sometimes artists use hogs hair brushes, like those used by oil painters, to make leafy effects.

Below you can see the clouds and background painted in first. I painted the trunk with dark brown, then lifted some lights while it was still damp. I used pen and ink for the textures.

Below is a waterfall with distant trees. These distant trees are done by wetting the entire sky area first. I waited until the paper had barely lost its shine and began dropping in golds and greens and blues to make these fuzzy looking distant fir trees. 

I'd never attempted to paint a willow tree, so here is my version. I learned how to do this from a video from Sarah Cray:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aYlvYm0_Cw

There are other videos but this one was only 9 minutes. This technique uses a soft, dry mop brush, but you can use a dry 1" flat, a makeup brush, or haki brush, anything with soft bristles.

You can also use a fan brush for some of the final touches.

Left to right, here are some methods:

Top row: Dry paper, wet brush, and salt; middle is sponge technique; right is droplets.

Bottom row: palm tree; pink blossoms done with droplets and dry spatter; and for tree done wet in wet.

Notice all of the foliage is done first and branches added afterward.

For the top left, I rolled the belly of the brush in the shape of the leaf clumps. I start with yellow, then light green, then darks. While wet I used table salt to create some tiny spaces.

The middle one is done with sponging. The video describes this. You can use celulose or natural sponge. Be careful to move the sponge around so you don't get too predictable a pattern. I start with yellow first, then do other colors.

The third one on the right and the pink tree are done similarly. This is the water drop method, and I really like it especially for keeping lots of spaces between branches and leaves, such as we see now in the springtime. Use a spritzing bottle to sprinkle drops of water on the paper (or you can spatter water drops).

Using a small brush, drop paint into each drop--try to add another color before the drop dries. In the pink one, I used quin rose and alizarin. For the green tree I used quin gold, cerulean, and French ultramarine.

When the leaves are dry, cover the surrounding area with paper towels and dry spatter over the leaves.