Why You Struggle to Paint Trees. I Can Help.

[Music] well hey everybody welcome back to the studio appreciate your showing up if you're new here hope you enjoy what you see and before we get started I just have to say that yes I'm wearing a hat in the studio but you know we're still under quarantine and about a whole month ago or so I gave myself a haircut and I promised my barber I will never complain about what you charge for a haircut and I gotta apologize to my father-in-law because I told him that I'd give him a haircut better than mine and unfortunately I'm really sorry about that pop but today we're gonna do a 8 by 10 painting and I'm gonna talk you through how to paint trees I know it's something that I struggled with when I first got started painting landscapes and I hear from so many of you that it's it's a problem that you have to so let's just break it down we're gonna take about an hour see where we're at at the end of that for this 8 by 10 here's the photo reference that I'm gonna be using and like all my videos I'll go ahead and talk you through what we're doing so let's get started all right well I've got my paint thinned down with a lot of turpentine I'm just gonna do a real simple block in get things down to their basic shapes you have my permission to sleep through this first part I will wake you up when we get onto the other side [Music] Mama's cooking in the kitchen and our stomachs have I we take a seat at the table as the son splits through the open blinds Dolly's barking from the front yard she wants to come inside hey I got a sweet suspicion he's a good time and I sunrise week on and that our goodbyes I never gone I see a field I'd breathe a little mine let go picking up on the soda signals of your sight the self is just connected all the things we have perfected when wind change with all this fight I think I better learn sometime [Music] okay kids nap times over the hectare work something I do try and remember when I'm painting trees is that trees are living breathing beings and they all have personalities of their own they don't look exactly like the tree that's next to them no matter if they were from you know the same seeds from the same tree they all will try and have their own space rarely do they jump into another tree space if they can help it and if you go into this thinking that you want your trees to have their own personality you're going to find that your paintings don't end up looking boring or like something you know that you would buy it out and a couch art sale and I know that's something we all strive to avoid when I'm applying the the paint here I am not using any medium I'm not using any liquid I will take and add just a touch of turpentine to it or can't gamsol and here you can see a little bit better the thickness I even though it looks like maybe there's a lot of paint going on there really isn't and I'll be able to go in and manipulate this and paint thicker passages over it very easily but you're just gonna have to play with it a little bit until you find out what your sweet spot is and you will unfortunately there's no shortcut to this but just remember you want enough to put it on that it looks like you're painting but not so much that your brush is sliding around and you've got a mess and you can't control it at all but the exciting part is the way you figure that out what that balance is is by painting too thick and too thin to start with and of course another good way of doing it is watching someone else paint and paying attention to the thickness that they paint and trying to do that so anyways you'll notice that I put some burnt sienna in the shadow parts of the trees to help get some warms in that very cool area and now I'm just knocking in some of that back hillside there and I'm paying very close attention to my reference and what that value is compared relatively to the trees that are in the front so rather than starting in the sky on this and in the background the way I do a lot of times I knew that I was gonna key everything off of these trees and as long as I do that and kind of build my way out and you'll notice that everything that I paint is connected to something that I've already painted then I can go ahead and gauge those values and I'm still keeping these trees very simple Shadowside lightside shadow side light side keep it that way until we get a little bit farther in and then you can start adding in some details but I'm not worried about getting in any kinds of branches or leaves or holes or anything like that now a couple of little holes that I painted in or just test holes to make sure that the values were correct so there's no detailing going on right now we're simply in the covering the canvas stage see now I'll notice that that's too dark because it blends in a little bit too much with the with the shadow side of the tree so I lightened it up a little bit and that works a little bit better the area that's in the light side the purple of the back hillside is roughly the same value as the light side of the trees it might be just a little bit lighter but the more time that I spend and get those values as close as you can now it's gonna it's going to keep you from having to make a lot of Corrections later on so take a little more time check your values against what you're putting down because everything you put down now affects everything else that's already on your canvas or is going to be on your canvas so now I'm putting in some of the blue sky leaving holes for I want the clouds to be now there are no clouds in my reference but I like to put some in to to add some interest and to keep your eye from from just kind of going off the top of the canvas and this I'm really just doing by I feel by instinct I have a general idea as to where I want these clouds to be and you know as I'm looking at these as I'm putting them in there they're too disjointed so I'm going to go in and see if I can't make them read a little more like one cohesive band of clouds up there and really it's just playing around with them a little bit till I get something that I like and I feel like the the light part of the clouds are different enough from the of the sky you definitely you want to know where the one ends and the other one begins but you know you put your paint down and you know that you can go in and play around with it until you get what you want if you don't like it wipe it off it's very simple wipe it off try it again I mean you painted it once you can you can do it again oh I want to mention you'll see that I've got a backpack on and that's because I'm also filming this with my GoPro and I have to have a shoulder mount in order for that to look any good so at least for this one I've now ordered a shoulder mount for my GoPro but on this one I'm wearing my backpack at the same time and I've got my GoPro going so you'll see a couple of different camera angles and and that's because I'm also filming this with my GoPro strapped to my chest and you haven't lived until you've tried painting with a camera strapped to your chest so obviously what I'm showing you in this tutorial or this demonstration is how I paint trees that are fully leaved out but and that's just cottonwood trees and with all the different kinds of trees that are out there not to mention the the different ways of foliage about being out whether it's in the fall or the winter with bare trees I mean those are all painted differently but there's still that same kernel going through them as far as how you paint them you break them down to very simple shapes and you don't put too much paint down too quickly you just kind of sneak up on on what you want the painting to look like as you go along and you can make in fact you should make corrections all along the way I don't remember where it was but I do remember that I read somewhere that a painting is just a series of of corrections and it's really true I mean you go in and you try something if it works great leave it alone and if it doesn't if you think you can paint it better then wipe it off and and do it again so if I can give you a piece of advice and I can't emphasize this enough never be afraid to to repaint something I used to tell and my wife that oh I'm not happy with this part so I'm gonna repaint it and she would look at me with fear in her eyes because she knows how much of a battle it was whenever I was learning and I told her you know if if I can paint at once I can paint it again and I think I can do it better and I never hesitate to to wipe something off if I feel like it's not absolutely as good as I can I can do it so I don't want you to be afraid to try something and if it doesn't work there's no harm no foul you've learned something you've learned a way that that it doesn't work this way but you'll try another way in it and it probably will work for you that's the one thing that I want to make sure that I get across to everyone is just don't be afraid to go in and and try something the more fearless you are when you're painting the faster you're going to develop as a painter fear has no place when you're standing in front of an easel it should just be experimentation and joy and using what you've learned trying it and asking yourself if it doesn't work why didn't it work and how can I fix it simple as that but it's never wasted time landscape painters you got to be able to paint trees you can't avoid it and you know you can tell the quality of a landscape artist by their trees you can't hide your weakness in your trees it doesn't matter whether you're just getting into doing landscapes or if you've been doing them for a long time if you're serious about wanting to get good I think I've recommended this book before but really this is my Bible that I go to I read it probably once a year maybe maybe sometimes more because every time I read it I pick up something new something that I maybe wasn't ready to to hear the last time and that book is Carlson's guide to landscape painting by John F Carlson now it was written a while ago I think was back in the 20s and the language is a little archaic but it's nothing that you can't get through so if you've never heard of it pick it up give it a give it a read if you have it but you you've tried it and you gave up on it pick it up again you know give it a chance it's just so chock-full of landscape painting goodness promise you you're going to pick something up from this and it's going to really take you to the next level if you give it the chance I was turned onto the book really early on from my first plein air teacher that I took a work that I took a workshop from and just right away I started when I started reading it I found so much that was helpful to me well let me just open up and read a little bit about what John Carlson says about painting trees he says much care should also be exercised in refraining from putting lights or highlights upon trees lest you endanger or even destroy their uprightness of plain the spotty appearance of The Beginner's trees is almost always due to this abuse of these vertical masses with spotty highlights this would almost seem to discourage the modeling or forming of the upright planes but the student will find that by having the upright planes definitely and generously darker than all other planes a comparatively slight variation of light and dark will suffice to model their form especially is this true when this variation in value is coupled with a close study of the color changes within the value mass beware of the darks within the dark masses such as the inside shadows of the tree the general tendency is to make them too black both accents and highlights on any mass use sparingly will tell without encroaching upon any other value matter or plane now he says it more eloquently than I have so far but basically that's what I've been telling you is don't worry about putting in highlights and seeing too much detail you want to have a light side and a shadow side and then you can blend those together a little bit as you go along and I don't know why we all have to say this but I'm not being paid to say that by Dover who prints this book but I will put a link to it down in the description so that you can easily find it but it's been out I think since he put it out I think it's been in print so you can get a new version of it or you can get one that's been used and all already marked up but I highly encourage you to pick up a copy and read it I mean I found out that just owning a book doesn't help you at all there's no osmosis when it comes to owning a book but not reading it now that I've got the trees mast in I'm just kind of overall working the whole thing because I know that everything that I put down is affecting everything else and so when I put something down I just check to make sure that it's going to work value wise and color wise with everything else that's been down there knowing that it's going to change what's there slowly adding in some of the some of the highlights here and they're just helping to define it a little bit more now when it comes to painting let's say the grass is in the foreground what I found is that you really don't need very much information in those grasses in order to get them to read like grasses you know so lay them down as a whole unit and you can go back in and add in a couple of grasses in the foreground and that's going to give your viewer everything that they need to know to describe what's what's on the ground there and if you're anything like me you've you've tried painting much more detail in the grasses and just find that it draws too much attention it's unnecessary and you should never put anything on your on your painting that you should never emphasize the unimportant you should never emphasize the unimportant in a painting I believe it was Harvey Dunn that said that and it's so true you need to decide what's important in your painting and put that in and leave the other stuff out that's going to compete with it as far as a focal point or drawing attention I mean if you want to draw attention down to the grasses then add more of them otherwise just a simple suggestion especially in in a timed painting will do now at this point out in the field I would consider you know this could be a finished painting and right now I'm just I'm just helping to add a little more information to it but you know I could easily in the if I was in the field just move on pack it up and then I have all the information from this little study that I need to go back into the studio and to do a larger painting but you know we'll continue on since I'm not out painting on location let me just keep going and see see what we can do here we'll just continue to add a little bit of finish to it [Music] well four wins me I'll be waiting [Music] I wait till morning shows its passing [Music] if you ain't coming here the road [Music] the colors are spraying the show butterflies in my heart you [Music] data we belong here anymore [Music] after all his also travelin [Music] tell me happen to be back home by chance please me thank you [Applause] other places have back to wrong [Music] some travel [Music] tell me happen to be like home by return [Applause] other places I'd like to wrong if you ain't coming I am the road I hear the road [Music] let me give you some thoughts that I jotted down while you watch me finish this up so these are Steve's words of painting wisdom and the first one is don't judge your paint too quickly develop a trust in your hand be loose and responsive to what you're seeing if you get the urge to try something new like change a color of a tree go for it it's the best way to grow but try to use your painting experience to guide you when you do don't just flail around at your canvas when you fail and you will I've got a closet full of them try to learn from what went wrong were you all there or was your mind somewhere else paintings hard enough when you have your whole attention let alone when you're somewhere else in your in your mind was it not thought through enough so that the composition was off was the drawing poor from the start were the values that you painted too dark or too light bad values aren't only something that you have when you go out on Saturday night you can have them on your paintings too and those are a whole lot easier to fix than that hangover on Sunday morning and like I said remember that each stroke you put down changes the painting that you've done so far be aware of how what you're doing is affecting what you've already put down and here's a good suggestion from Kevin McPherson put out twice as much paint as you're used to putting out and use it all don't scrub a tiny bit of paint on your canvas and breathe a sigh of relief when you get used to using more paint you'll find that you can control it better and finally let your brush do the hard work for you use it to create interesting marks [Music] well good morning everybody it's the next morning I've gone ahead and thrown a frame on here I spent about five minutes simplifying some of the values adding in a couple of little hanging some of the jewelry as I like to call it and just kind of refining things a little bit like I said I threw the frame on it here to see what it would look like and you know one of the things that I did it's not a perfect painting of trees as you can see but one of the things that I did not do that just kind of slipped my mind when I was painting this is I didn't first of all I think I painted this area in here a little bit too dark but I don't have enough warms and cools in here to kind of make it a little more interesting so I think I'm going to go in and just spend a little bit of time modifying this we're not talking big changes we're talking you know little minut changes that you do with a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer let me go ahead and and and work on this for a few minutes but I think we're going to get a better feeling of light coming into these trees in the shadow areas let's get going when I work on a painting and at the same time as I have a frame on it I'm very careful not to get too close to the edges I'll only leave the frame on and work on it if I know that I'm not having to go to the edge of the painting otherwise I'll take it out of the frame and continue to work on it this gives me just a better idea as to how it's going to look once its framed and you know having the frame on it helps me to see that I need needed to have more of the warms in the trees by putting in that you know the the Browns in the trees there that helps it to work better with the frame that's on it now this isn't the final frame that's going to go on it I have it on order but at least it gives me an idea as to how it works in a gold frame or even a black frame that has a gold Filat on the inside one of the other things that I noticed that I needed to do when I came in the studio in the morning was I needed to soften some of the edges on the trees I I find that a lot of times I will paint the edges a little bit too hard and trees especially as they go up towards the sky they become a little more transparent and have a little bit more light on them and so if you soften those edges up towards the top well all over but specifically up towards the top you're going to find that they read more like they're actually lit by the Sun and we are truly coming towards the finish line here just continuing to add a little bit of light filtering through those trees so that you could see into the shadows a little bit more and with cottonwood trees it's not apparent on these particular trees but they have a lot of branches towards the bottom that will kind of poke themselves out a lot of dead wood and so that's what I'm adding in there to give it a little more of a cottonwood feel adding some blues into the shadows one of the things that that I've learned from carlson is as the shadow goes away from the tree it's influenced its shadow on the ground it's influenced more by the light that's coming down from the sky so it gets a little lighter and a little bluer and here it is in the frame all finished up I'm relatively happy with it I think it shows you how I paint trees and hopefully it gives you a little bit of an idea of how you can approach them so hey listen I appreciate you showing up if this was helpful hit the like button and share it with some of your friends who you think might might enjoy it but I won't tell you to to subscribe because I know that you're already subscribed right [Laughter] anyways I do appreciate and showing up and as always I see you down the road [Music]

Channel: Steve Atkinson Fine Art

Views: 78,908

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Id: JDRyQCBfpRk

Length: 28min 49sec (1729 seconds)

Published: Fri May 22 2020