#112 Brush Techniques For Painting Trees | Oil Painting Tutorial

This is where I left it yesterday. We have an area here that I'd finished, blocked in and finished. But before I finished it, it looked like this. Now that's just an acrylic bed, acrylic blocking on the panel, obviously that's totally dry now. Not a great deal of effort really went into colour matching and making it look precise but it's certainly good enough. Also in the photograph you can see loads of gaps and holes in the tree, it's not a solid tree like I'd blocked it in. I'll add those afterwards. If it was a tree that was a bit more sparse, then perhaps I would have blocked the sky in and then I would have put the tree in over the top of that. But I think because it is very much a solid tree, or it's a full tree, I would put the gaps in afterwards. Let me show you now different techniques to get that tree to look right. So the first thing's first, and that is to add the darker tones within the tree. That's always the first place, once of course the blocking is dry. Now whether you've blocked that in in oil or acrylic, that needs to be a dry bed really to do this technique. Now I'm going to use the Tree and Texture Series 32, size 3 8ths by Rosemary and Co. Now what I've done with this brush is I've just roughed it up a little bit, and what I've done is I've chopped into the base here, sort of diagonal chops, and what that's done is it's thinned it out a little bit and made it a little bit less regular, and that's kind of what you need in order to do this. If you've got any other brush you can do the same thing with, I mean here's just an older brush, I don't actually know who that's by, but you just need to rough up this edge, make it look a bit more like that. Do what you need to do to age your brush so that you've got separate little clumps. Even a brush that perhaps hasn't been cleaned properly it would work with, and you're kind of just going to dab the dark on. So we've got Liquin in this little jar here. So I've been mixing Liquin straight on the palette and adding black to it. Now what happens when you do this is you get a coloured Liquin more than anything else and that's giving us a glaze, so we're not adding a great deal of black to that. Now that is giving us, as I was saying, that is darkening the block-in, it's not changing the colour of the block-in, and then as we go darker we just add more colour to it, or if we're going dark we're adding black or brown or even blue or green, and then that will start to cover it a bit more. It's still a glaze because of the Liquin. Now the reason we're able to use black is because it's now a glaze it's literally just going to darken what's underneath, it's not going to appear black, it's just going to darken the greens that we've already used to block-in. If you find that it's not quite dark enough then you can put a little bit more paint with it so it's not quite so diluted, or vice versa. So what I'm doing here is just dabbing that glaze over here. Now some of the areas are clearly darker than others, I'm not going to worry too much about that to begin with, I'm just going to give this almost a blanket coverage really with this technique, and then we can add those darker tones afterwards. And actually if you were to see this on say this here, just to give you an idea, this is all we're doing, so as you can see we're not covering the whole thing, it's just very much a spotty kind of textured look, that's all we're doing with this, but because we've already got that colour blocked in bed it's actually looking as if there's quite a bit of detail that is in there. Right so I've put a few of the branches in, I think there are going to need to be more in there eventually, but let's start now putting some of the leaves on the tree. I do think we're going to need as I say to add a few more darks, but let's get working on that now and I'll show you the different techniques I'm going to use, or the different techniques that you can use to do that. We're going to start first of all, while we've got the rigger brush, we're going to start and I'll show you how to do the techniques with that first of all. Right so obviously now we're going to need to change the colour, we've been working with darks so far, we've got that lighter green, well let's first of all go with that green, we've got the sap green, I'm going to brighten that by using the yellow, we're going to need to cool it slightly, I'm going to do that with this cerulean blue, maybe a bit of both. Using thinner, you don't need to use thinner, but with this technique I do use thinner. So I'm just going to get the colour roughly right so I can start showing you. Okay let's zoom in, and we'll start working up here, let's just add a bit more white, make it a bit stronger, so the consistency of the paint is like an ink, and I'm just going to literally paint on, as you can see there, tiny little marks, I mean they really are quite small, and that's a very detailed and accurate way, oops, a very detailed and accurate way of painting the lighter canopies, but if we were to look at that on a different background, it would look something like this, a load of separate little marks, tiny little lines almost, all different shapes and directions, nothing moving in the same way, all of a similar size, and they tend to be clumped, so you'll have an area clumped like that and then you might move down to a different clump, a different shape and size, and maybe that links with this one here, so just be observant with the photograph, but that's essentially all it is. So now what we're going to do is, it's using the brush, so we've flattened the brush out, I've probably shown you this before, we've flattened the brush out so now it's more like a palette knife, if you can imagine, a palette knife is flat on one side, you turn it over and it's obviously sharp there, the brush is the same, it's flat, we've just flattened it out so you've got one sharp edge, so we draw back, turn it over, draw back again, now we've picked up a fair amount of paint on the end, now what we're going to do is just use the corner, so we're not dabbing straight on, I've turned the brush so that's horizontal to the panel, it's about 45 degrees that way, not straight on, so about 45 degrees that way, and then maybe 45 degrees down at this angle as well, and then using that flat, I'm going to just dab on the panel with it, just touching the panel with the corner of the brush, very much as if I was using a palette knife, and just touching, gently touching, and what that does is that gives us, that gives us almost like a triangle effect, so you can see it's slightly different from this, in fact if you look at that brush the way it is, there's one part of it is slightly, the angle is slightly sharper, so as you can see it's all coming in that direction, and that is what is giving us the V, it's an upside down V I suppose really, so a triangle is the best way to describe it, and now what that does, because we are putting the paint on thicker, it's going to give us a much better coverage, so if you are laying paint over a darker background, the thicker the paint, the better the coverage is going to be, the more it's going to stand out, or the more it will sit over the top of that dark and be bright, with this, because that's a little bit more, because it's thinner, because this is thinner, you have to go a little bit brighter in order to get the coverage, so that's another technique. Now with moving on to the outside twigs and leaves of this tree here, I'm going to use the first technique that we used with this Rosemary & Co series 7-1 size 1, I'm going to go slightly darker than we have done, so let's just darken that paint a little bit, some of those areas around the outside are very dark indeed, so we are going to thin the paint down so that we can get the nice tight mark, and then I'm just going to extend some of these leaves, doing the same uneven shape like that, out to the sky there. So now using the same technique, I'm going to introduce some of the sky into the tree there, some of the gaps, now I'm going to do a different technique in this part as well, with the lighter leaves, but I'm going to show you that in a minute. First of all, I'm going to put in the gaps, so using the Riga brush, go straight in with the white, a little bit of cerulean blue, not too much, and some thinner. So the last technique that I'm going to show you is to use a different brush, now this is the Rosemary & Co series 2055 size 1, and we are going to mix up the paint that we need here for the canopies, but it hasn't been thinned, so this is paint straight from the tube, and we're going to use, we're going to pick up that paint on the outside of that corner of the brush there, so we're loading that up, and very much like we did when we did the thicker paint here, we're going to do the same sort of thing, I'm just gently touching the corner of that brush against the panel, very very gentle, and it's giving us a similar shape, just to show you, that corner isn't working so well, so I'm going to change to the other corner, so that's the brush stroke it's giving us. It's not quite a triangle, it's a little bit less regular than the effect we get with the brush, a bit more like that, and that works very well in some circumstances, the only thing is, because it is quite furry, that's why I call it furry, you've got a lot of little tiny little brush marks there, so one brush, one dab gives you lots of different tiny little bits of paint on there, because of that, if you go around the outside, it tends to give you a bit of an unnatural look, but that's really one of the only problems with using that technique. Here we go, so that is how I paint trees, well they're three of the techniques that I use most commonly to paint trees, it can change a little bit depending upon where the tree is, so for example, if it's right in the distance, slightly different technique, if it's right in the foreground, once again, slightly different technique, and I can go through those with you in another video, but tomorrow, I'm going to be working on this grass here, and I'm going to show you the techniques that I use to get that to look like that.