How to Paint Tree Foliage

[Music] hmm good morning at least it's morning here i thank you for watching this video my name is jason tako i'm going to take you through this plein air painting today we're going to talk about a few different things that we're going to be covering in this video the first and primary one is painting front lit greens and front lit trees now the tree that i'm going to paint here is pretty much front lit straight on it's a bit of a challenge for me because when you're playing or painting i turn my easel away from the sun so that's facing toward the blue sky and not toward the sunlight and my primary reason for doing that is to keep the sunlight off of my palette and my painting because if i have it on there at least i personally have a tendency to paint too dark when i get the painting back in the studio i'll look at it and it just it has this dark mucky look to it that's just the way my eyes work you might not be the same way i know some other artists who will paint front lit scenes with their with the sunlight straight on their canvas and palette and that works for them and that's wonderful but i take a little bit of a different approach so it is a bit of a challenge because i constantly have to turn around and look at the subject but it does keep me from painting too dark the other challenge is going to be showing dimension on a front lit scene a lot of times there's the temptation to paint the front lit scene pretty flat because you don't have those shadows on the side of the subject and so that's going to be another challenge and also painting these greens that are illuminated by the sun against a very intensely blue sky there is a dead tree in there that we're going to be tackling as well first of all before we get too far into it let me tell you my colors titanium white cadmium yellow light cadmium orange yellow ochre transparent red oxide that can also be burnt sienna they're very close cadmium red which is starting to run down on my other colors here alizarin crimson ultramarine blue cobalt blue cerulean blue viridian and chromium i'm sorry not chromium green oxide but permanent green i usually have chromium green oxide on my palette but we're trying permanent green today i'm out of chromium green oxide at least for my small tubes and i have the permanent green so figured let's give it a shot and if you are new to my channel if you could do me a favor and um hit the subscribe button hit the notification bell as well that will let you know whenever i'm going to post another video i usually post on saturdays saturday mornings eastern time i also will do some studio stuff where i will live stream for my studio so anyway would love to have you as a part of my channel i have a patreon account if you're interested in supporting my channel and if you do become a patreon member there is a link below there are some perks for that the biggest perk that any level of membership gets is early access to all my videos and there are some other great perks as well so anyway check that out if you're interested and i also teach live online painting classes i do it to resume do that on saturdays and i take you through my whole painting process step by step tell you all the colors i'm mixing we work on a painting over one month period of time start to finish all the sessions recorded in case you can't make a live session i also have membership so you can just watch my full monthly demonstration which goes a lot more in depth than my youtube videos do as far as the painting process is concerned so if you want to take your painting to the next level check that out there's a link below for that as well so i'm just going to draw the kind of an outline of the tree i'm massing in some approximants i'm going to start with the darks because the darks are the most obvious thing to grab onto as far as value and a lot of times color a lot of times the darks are fairly close to black not quite black but they're close and so i'd like to get those in there because then i can measure all my other colors and values from that back here i'm cooling this down a little bit these are the background trees gives it a bit of depth i'm putting my horizon line low and the reason for that is because there's not a whole lot there in the foreground and that's something you need to ask yourself when you're painting you know what am i after what is most important to me for me it's these trees against the sky so i don't need a lot of ground i just need enough ground to tell me that there is ground there but there's something that the trees go into and then i'm in pretty good shape i also want to let you know if you are new to the channel check out my channel i have a lot of other videos very similar to this i paint in the east i paint in the west mountains trees buildings the whole works a lot of it plein air most of it plein air so go ahead and check that out there's a lot of good stuff there and most of my videos are not time lapsed a lot of people time lapse them i do some of my long studio paintings because well you probably wouldn't want to sit for four or five hours and watch me do a painting maybe you would i don't know but i do time lapse those let's switch to a bigger brush you're going to hear some traffic in the background i apologize for that can't do much about that they just happened to build a road right where my painting subject was going to be how dare they so [Music] right now we're going to ignore the sky holes those are the parts of the tree where you can see the sky through them and well i'm gonna try to maintain some of the general character of the tree i'm going to use it more to create my own interesting shapes [Music] so my goal is not to capture the tree exactly as it is but use it as an inspiration [Music] and i'm going to take this tree it's a tall tree so i'm gonna take it to the top of my canvas to emphasize that it's tall all the colors that i'm laying down right now are just approximates by the way we paint a lot slower in my workshops my monthly workshops because we can and because i want to take you guys step by step but out here we go full bore [Music] right now though you can see i'm not after exact color i'm really just after approximate values creating a value map if you will keeping the paint very thin [Music] at this point it's almost more of an abstraction process i'm thinking a bit more like an abstract painter at this point who will bring hopefully a beautiful reality out of this kind of abstract situation we have going on here working like this gives you a lot of courage if you start out really tense and really tight wanting to capture reality exactly as it is at the very beginning that can kind of create a psychological situation in your head where you just become stiff and tight and one of the ways to really loosen up as a painter is to not worry about capturing things exactly as they are at the beginning or through the entire process [Music] look at nature is giving you suggestions not as some kind of dictator and as the don't look at nature as the ultimate arbiter of the quality of your work a lot of really good painters did not paint reality exactly as it is some of the best actually don't paint reality exactly as it is they use reality as a means of self-expression [Music] and if you've successfully expressed yourself then your painting successful no matter what other people think about it no matter whether it looks exactly like the scene or not now of course there are some objective things that you want to have that you want to take into consideration depending on how realistic you intend to be but if you don't intend to be very realistic then that gives you a lot more flexibility if you will to be independent of judgment sometimes even your own judgment in my workshops we do a monthly critique session where the students can bring a painting in and out they'll get an anonymous critique and i usually if i remember to say it i usually point out a caveat saying that you know if your intention is not to be a realist or not to capture objective reality as it is then a lot of what i say can be completely disregarded but if your intention is to capture reality then that does confine you more to certain rules and things like that that you want to adhere to so that your painting looks like your subject within a reasonable manner if you will i tend to be a little more of a realist i'm not a photorealist so i tend to follow the rules if you will a bit more closely than somebody who is more of more toward abstraction [Music] [Music] there is a hint of green in this i'll try to imply that okay so big objective is we have essentially three value masses going on in here we have our sky which according to the rule of angles of consequent values should usually be our lightest value mass in a landscape then we have a ground plane which should be our next darkest value mass but it's debatable today with this dead grass here it's picking up a lot of sunlight and its local color is very very light so that dead grass could compete with the sky realistically as a lighter value plane now i may want to bring it down [Music] manipulate it a bit just to make the painting read better we'll see and then we have our uprights our trees which are usually the darkest value mass in the painting there are always caveats to that of course so i want to make sure that whatever i do i'm preserving those essential value masses so my darkest darks are going to be in the uprights in the trees and my highlights in the trees should not get as dark as or as light as here or the sky and that's where a lot of beginners get lost is that they'll look at the highlights in the trees alone they'll fail to compare that the values of those highlights with the sky and they'll end up painting it lighter than the sky that's one of the biggest problems with that artists struggle with especially beginning artists is that they fail to compare overall value masses in their landscapes they fail to compare the highlights in the trees to the sky they fail to compare the darks further back with the darks in the foreground darks in the foreground should almost always be darker than the darks that are further back and they should be warmer and that's where most landscapes fall apart [Music] if you like this video give me a thumbs up too i'm not sure if i said that before if you don't like it and give it a thumbs down [Music] hopefully you like it though [Music] so [Music] this is getting toward this is the end of september so we have some of these trees are starting to turn color [Music] okay [Music] [Music] i'm applying this paint with a very light touch [Music] because i'm working wet on wet it can be really easy to create a big mess and the key to not creating a big mess is to put a nice light touch on and i'm working from the ground up [Music] because my darkest values are here and i want to have these darkest values next to the highlights that i'm putting on so that i can measure those values more accurately and what i mean by measuring the values is always you're doing is you're just comparing these values to the ones that are next to it [Music] and also the colors if you could crawl in my head right now you probably want to get out right away if you could but if you crawl my head right now you would um basically hear me saying to my asking myself you know warmer cooler lighter darker it's pretty much all that goes on up there trust me just ask my old high school teachers [Music] i'm gonna go in a bit more with the palette knife [Music] as we get toward the top of the tree we do have these highlights up there that are catching quite a bit of sunlight but these still even though they get a little bit lighter in value i still want to make sure that they remain darker than the sky i can maybe fudge it a little bit and maybe get a little bit lighter than the ground plane with them since they're kind of far away from the ground plane than the painting so you might not visually make that connection but i still want to make sure that the value is darker than the sky [Music] [Music] in a lot of my videos you'll see me paint the sky last or at least block in the sky last but i didn't do that here just because i guess [Music] i did put it in very thin though so that i could go back in and readjust the value if need be [Music] [Music] so gonna get a little more daring and see how light we can go with some of these values at the very top i cool them off a bit too cooling off cooling them off and lightening them a bit is going to help give this front lit tree a little bit of dimension so it cools off and it lightens it starts to merge more toward the sky as it folds away from us [Music] at the top on the sides i'm leaving it dark i'm [Music] and that subtle little difference is going to keep this tree from looking flat [Music] i really need to neutralize these greens [Music] this permanent green right here you are not going to find that in nature pretty much guarantee you that you can go all over the world and you know unless you find some weird chemical thing or something you're not going to find this kind of green in trees anywhere trees have a lot of red and they're green they're very neutralized and so this permanent green really has to be toned down in order to make it look correct as far as temperature color temperature is concerned [Music] [Music] not sure if you can hear gunshots there's a shooting range not too far from here i'm in a game management area pretty soon i won't be able to be in here without wearing blaze orange and i'd rather not wear blaze orange because if i'm facing the sun at all that blaze orange will pick up that sunlight cast this just awful glare of orange all over my painting and palette and i just can't paint like that i don't think anybody really can so there's quite a variety of greens in these trees here i'm seeing slightly cooler greens slightly warmer greens the slightly cooler greens they just have a little bit less yellow in them they shift a little more toward green or blue if you will and the slightly warmer greens they have a bit more yellow in them i think i'm gonna have to revive my cadmium yellow light here okay colors are revived [Music] should have probably grabbed some more white while i was at it that cool back there is a little too cool [Music] so we're going to warm that up just a bit not too much though i still want it to feel farther away back there i might cut that down more because it's not quite right in half but it feels like it i don't need a lot of that hill back there [Music] the more that hill there is the more it competes with the tree and the more i have to fuss with it too so and it's one of the beauties of being an artist is you don't have to fuss with insignificant things in your painting i remember i used to in my earlier years of painting [Music] you know there'd be something in the background that didn't mean a hill of beans difference as far as making a good painting and i would spend eons messing with it as if i'd win some kind of award or something for you know that was the best you know inch and a half of background hill that means nothing whatsoever to your painting that i've ever seen in my life and you get an award for that [Music] for me the more insignificant garbage i can cut out of my painting and still make it work the better you can have a better painting as a result and it just makes your life a lot easier so don't bother with insignificant stuff that's a pain when it's not going to do anything for you [Music] [Music] so okay [Music] that's an interesting greenish tone i wonder if that is anywhere in this tree actually i kind of like that that's a nice i don't know if i'm really seeing that there but there are maybe little dabs of it here and there it's just a neutralized tone i kind of came across that gives it an interesting look okay so trying to decide where to go next that permanent green look how strong that is that just completely has taken over the other two colors [Music] and it's way too green way too cool green i should say we need to really warm this one up [Music] warm it and neutralize it [Music] it's not too bad so i'm going to use that as kind of a mother color if you will it's a leap off of and make adjustments to [Music] i'm pretty happy with the overall values and color temperature color temperature relationships in the painting so now i want to go in and start adding some little shifts of dimension in here and texture not a lot but just [Music] some so that we can [Music] make this tree a little more dynamic [Music] there's a hint of more gray in the leaves over here [Music] i have a feeling this is going to look really neat in a few weeks when autumn is in full session so i might come back and paint this scene again in the autumn colors monet used to do a lot of stuff like that the haystacks [Music] he painted them multiple lighting scenarios i guess he was lucky that the livestock didn't go underneath the hay on him or maybe he put it back up again it's probably a whole history behind that i don't i'm not aware of okay in here there's some slightly more intense more yellowish greens and i'm seeing right in the spot here [Music] and i'm really trying to squint at this scene when i look at it now [Music] so i don't get too lost in the details [Music] and once again i'm just looking at the scene and i'll look at a spot and go okay this looks like it has a little more yellow in it it's a little brighter and a little more yellow a little warmer than what's next to it so i'm gonna go to my [Music] colors and add a bit more yellow even a touch of white whatever it takes to give them the proper appearance stick it on there test it out see if it looks good so you might be waiting with baited breath for me to put in that dead tree it's gonna happen don't worry [Music] it's kind of the icing on the cake for me [Music] [Music] okay i'm gonna save some of this green that i mixed put it on the side basically three general piles okay so i decided actually i'm gonna tackle that dead tree first i don't i'm not totally crazy about the shape of that thing so i might change it a little bit let's stick it right here take a smaller brush [Music] so the tree definitely looks a bit cooler than what's around it but i know it's not as cool as i think and i might go just a hair darker in value than what i believe it to be the temptation we would be to paint that a very light value and i i could even see some more beginning artists going in there with almost pure white and that would be a mistake [Music] [Music] okay i think i'm gonna have to mix some more [Music] of this color [Music] it's pretty close using an imitation badger hair brush rosemary and company series 279 these are really nice brushes for this type of work for more precision drawing sharper edges now hopefully you're getting the idea of why i spent so much time on these green trees before i put in this dead tree because after painting all these little branches and things like that if i had to go back in and make adjustments around all this intricate stuff i'm painting now that would be a nightmare i'd have a big huge mess so part of good painting whether it's plein air or studio is good planning and a lot of that comes from experience it also comes from good training [Music] [Music] [Music] there's a lot of ink intricate things going on drawing branches things like that industry i'm not going to bother with all of it [Music] today i can but i'd be out here for a lot longer and i don't think i need to bother with it to make a decent painting [Music] if you've watched my other videos you've heard me say a lot that my primary objective is to capture good color and good value intricate drawing can be done [Music] later on through a sketchbook through photographs painting you know doing it later in the studio from photographs and so forth and i do recommend if you are a beginning artist get yourself a sketchbook and go out and draw a lot of trees carlson talks about this in his book on landscape painting go out and draw a lot of trees and draw them very tight drawing very intricate you have to do that to a certain point so that you get a feel and organic feel for how trees really are and how they grow and everything so that you get out of the habit of drawing mental symbols of what you think something looks like and instead getting all that stuff out of your head and drawing what you're actually seeing in front of you and then eventually what happens is after you've drawn what you've seen in front of you enough times you get to the point where you can draw or paint representations of it look at the character of it without having to draw it intricately so it's basically just kind of three stages of drawing if you will there's the and what i mean by drawing is i don't mean even just drawing with the pencil i mean making something the correct shape the correct size and sticking it in the right place whether you're doing that with a pencil with a brush so on and so forth but there's three stages essentially in drawing now this is my opinion i'm sure somebody out there might disagree or have their own stages and that's fine but this is what i found is that there's the beginning stage when you're when you're a kid or you're a beginning artist and you really draw symbols you're drawing mental symbols of what you think the subject looks like without really looking at the subject your powers of observation are much more limited and you're usually a bit impatient or really impatient i see this in my students where and i saw it in myself a lot i was really like this so there is hope if you're impatient but you're not really looking at what's there or you and it's not like you're not trying maybe it could be you're really trying but you just it hasn't clicked on yet and it does click on when you do it but what you do is you you paint more of a symbolic shape if you will and the extreme example of this is like a kid who will paint clouds and they'll paint just a bunch of billowy shapes or they'll they'll paint trees and they'll paint two lines with the circle at the top looks like a lollipop um that's the first stage of drawing and most people don't do not get out of that stage the second stage of drawing is where you start to move beyond that and you start to draw everything very literally and there's inner there's intermediate stages between these so somebody could be moving out of the purely mental symbolic stage if you will into more the observation observational stage but when you get into that stage that's when you you try drawing everything exactly how it is and you have to go through that stage to a certain point that brush is too stiff for what i want [Music] and so in that stage you would be trying to draw every single leaf every single branch and as i said you kind of have to do that you have to go through that stage because that's the only way to really break the first stage of drawing the merely symbolic you know i'm going to draw a tree with two lines and a circle at the top and then you eventually move into the third stage of drawing where you've internalized the natural more abstract qualities that are in nature and you you learn to look at nature and to capture the essential characteristics of something and you can draw those essential characteristics without having and capture what it looks like without having to draw every single little nook and cranny and you could argue that that's kind of going back to stage one and that could be a valid argument to make however you're going back to stage one with experience versus stage one is really has no experience [Music] it's like that in music too i used to be a musician and musician will start out you know just playing googly gop banging on the keyboard you know a kid bangs on the piano has no clue what they're doing just let's go with all abandon and then you decide to get serious about it so you learn different tunes you learn scales modes arpeggios two octave scales two active modes two active arpeggios [Music] learn you know how to read music syncopation music theory all that stuff and then you basically learn that stuff so well that you can kind of go back to stage one with experience and just start banging it out again with complete abandon but this time it actually sounds good when i was in music school they said you know you want to learn the skills so well that you can forget them [Music] so that's just a really long way of saying get a sketchbook practice drawing trees really well really well very tight do it for a while if you want to paint trees that is and then you can eventually abandon trying to draw trees exactly how they are and just draw the characteristics of them that could be trees people buildings you know anything [Music] okay and make sure you banish the detailed critics out of your head or out of your life if you need to those people who say oh there's not enough detail in there or it's doesn't look very much like it whatever garbage people will say just don't worry about that don't let that don't let that be a determination of your abilities there's always room for constructive critique but if somebody's just being a jerk then just forget about it that's usually just somebody masking their own insecurities [Music] [Music] there's a lot of sky holes in this tree [Music] not gonna go after all of them [Music] don't need to [Music] nobody's going to come back and say hey you didn't get that exact little spot there [Music] [Music] [Music] so actually um i like curving that down more that shape [Music] it's not exactly how it is in life but we just got through talking about all that so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] so i want to say too that what i was talking about a few minutes ago with drawing also happens with color and value it happens with art in general you'll start out painting what you think you know and not really looking or observing a lot of becoming good at art is in a certain sense learning how not to think and not that you don't think trust me you do a lot of thinking but it's changing your thinking so that your thinking is not so much based on preconceived mental concepts that you've always used in life such as trees are green wood is brown so on and so forth but instead shutting that off and just really looking at nature really looking at the colors and the values and then being able to go to your palette and say okay this is what i need to mix approximately to get what i'm seeing out there and then you mix that and you try it and it might not work so you mix it you try it again and the process keeps going on until you finally get it that was a beautiful bird a lot of that just comes from good training will help get you there but you also have to make it your own experience too and the only way you can make it your own experience is just by doing it a lot [Music] the training is good because it will show you what you need to look for where your weaknesses are what you need to aim for and what you need to work on but you always of course need to back that up with diligent effort on your own part that's just life whether you're an athlete an artist a musician anything you do requires good training [Music] unless you have a good knack for it and some people do [Music] but no matter what you have to work at it you have to practice [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] uh so [Music] [Music] oops just bumped the microphone there hopefully it wasn't a big [Music] crash [Music] okay some of these branches from this tree they get dark as they protrude out into the sky so it's almost like the reverse value you go from being the tree goes from being light to having some uh dark out there and that's just because of how bright the sky is good example of how it's always about relationships [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] be sure to uh go check out my other videos [Music] i have quite a few of them now and there's more on the way and if you haven't done so yet do me a favor give me a thumbs up keeps the algorithms happy as i like to say [Music] [Music] [Music] okay let's mix a little more of this light value color [Music] it's good to start out with not sure if that's exact but it's close [Music] [Music] [Music] it's interesting as these some of these branches protrude out into the sky you'll see light and dark values in them [Music] that's probably just areas where it's [Music] the light areas are exposed branches and the darks are probably peeled rotted wood [Applause] i'm gonna soften this side the sun is starting to swing over a bit so [Music] so [Music] let's do a little more touch up in the foreground and then we're gonna see how we look here [Music] okay [Music] [Music] put a bit of dimension back there applying just a little bit of shadow [Music] so [Music] [Music] i'm gonna take a little bit of artistic liberty and it might not even be artistic liberty might just be something that i didn't really catch because of my focus on the more top area of the trees but i want to punch up this shrub plant whatever it is right here at the bottom [Music] i really like that i think that's helping a lot [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so so do just a bit of softening on the edges that's going to help with the front lighting the softening of edges and keeping the edges sharper in the middle that's also going to help give the feeling of dimension when you're dealing with a mostly front lit scenario as we have here if i kept the edges hard all around you wouldn't have quite as strong strong of an effective dimension so edges can be a very useful tool for showing dimension [Music] i really hope you enjoyed watching this video and that you found it helpful feel free to leave a comment in the comment section ask any questions you may have within reason i will try to answer them really like uh having you guys [Music] you're watching my videos it's a pleasure and a joy to do this [Music] and i hope to see you at the next one thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Jason Lee Tako

Views: 36,687

Keywords: Painting a tree in full sunlight, painting greens in full sunlight, beginning a painting with abstraction, abstract art, abstract realism, how to paint loose tree foliage, how to paint trees, how to paint leaves, impressionism, oil painting outdoors, oil painting outside, plein air painting, how to oil paint outside, how to paint tree foliage, how to paint a summer tree, how to paint greens, landscape painting, how to paint a landscape, how to paint a defoliated tree

Id: WuYBd6TWz7M

Length: 87min 21sec (5241 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 09 2021