WATERCOLOR TRICKS for painting realistic trees

Hello there! Welcome to another World Watercolor Month video. I'm Sandy Alnock, and today I want to talk trees. I love painting trees. I know a lot of you do as well, but you struggle with trying to get them to look realistic, get your greens to look good. Well, I've got a little secret. It's just a little tip that might change everything. I'm going to finish the right half of that painting in this video. I had a discussion recently with a student who was on Threads, and we were talking about his trees. He was trying to paint landscapes that had trees scattered across them, and he was using very fine detail. And this is not my norm for doing trees, but I thought since we had talked about it, I would demonstrate it, and maybe it would help some other people as well. So for realistic, very, very realistic trees, don't stick with just your bright colors, meaning like pure pigments. Don't use just your sap green or your viridian or whatever the green is that you want to use. If you use just those, they don't tend to feel very realistic because trees have a lot of flow from one color to another. And the more you can emphasize that, the more your tree can look really fun, but also very realistic. The colors I'm mixing here are sap green and transparent red oxide. Now you can do the same thing with a burnt sienna, and you can do it with any green as well. The thing that these colors do together, if you think about a burnt sienna or transparent red oxide as a reddish color, and then whatever your green is your greenish color, what do red and green mean on a color wheel? They are opposites. They're complements, which means they desaturate each other and they darken each other. And most trees are going to be the darkest element in your landscape. And when I was trying to help him, he was having trouble because he was trying to make his trees all green and happy and bright, and they were not feeling like they were in the landscape. They felt like they were on top of the landscape. And it really makes a difference when you start to get both darker in value and more desaturated, because then it just starts to feel realistic. Even though our brains tell us it's green, in reality it's got a lot more subtlety to it. Now one of the things that I do when I'm going to be shifting back and forth between a lot of colors is I'll have different puddles in my palette. And this is a House of Hoffman palette. It's got a big, you know, butcher tray, whatever large area you have for mixing. And I have some area of it where it's going to be pure pigment. So some of it is pure sap green, some of it is pure transparent red oxide. Some of it is wetter, so it's thinner. Some of it is thicker and darker. And some of it has more green, some of it has more of the brownish color in it. That means every time I dip my brush into any paint, I can decide what do I need at that moment. If I want some really bright for one spot, I want to have some really bright sap green, I can grab some. Or I can start dumping in some other colors. And it really depends on what area of each of the branches that I'm doing. But I like to use these kind of colors together for the branches and the tree trunks as well, because those end up actually merging together. And I guess I'm trying to figure out how to explain this. A lot of times people will take a black or a Payne's gray or something to make the tree branches because they think, okay, it's got a gray tree trunk or brown tree trunk, I'm going to make a really dark one and just stab at all of my clusters of leaves with them. And then you end up with a line for the branch that just kind of stops in the middle of or on top of your leaf cluster. And it just looks like it's sticking out there doing nothing. It just doesn't look realistic. When you're using the same colors in the branches and the tree trunks, they merge together. And they start looking really natural as they dry together. And you'll see a little bit more of the branches at the end. When they start drying, they just melt together. You can also put washes of some of those brighter colors that you want underneath of the detail that you put on top. So I've got some sections of these trees that had this golden kind of orangey color, and I'm letting some of it shine through in between the detail that I'm putting on top and other parts of it I'm covering. So it doesn't feel like a brown or orange fall tree, but it has just a little bit of something else in it. If it was all the same color, it wouldn't look particularly realistic. And I know when you look at a tree, you just see green. If you're not used to really looking for subtleties, and there are so many subtleties in trees, it's one of the things that makes them so much fun to paint. And so sometimes I love painting in this style even though it's not my norm, but it, I don't know, just something about getting a very fine brush out to do all this detail is just making me happy today. Now as you work, you also are going to want to darken some colors. And here I've popped in just a little bit of Payne's Blue Gray into the mix so that I can put some of those super sharp dark spots in there. And that's mixed with the colors that are already in the palette, so it's going to feel like it belongs in the tree. But I needed to have some darker areas in order to finish this up. And I just want to say to those who are taking my trees classes on art-classes.com, those trees are not done this way. They're done in a much looser, freer style, larger brush strokes, with some of this little calligraphy work, but not a ton of it. And I didn't use all of these neutral colors, the desaturated colors, in the trees themselves. So they're done a little bit differently than this. It's not that one or the other is wrong. This is just a question that I had from somebody who wanted help with his paintings because he was trying to get some landscapes with more realistic trees. And yeah, just figured more of you would get something out of it. So here I'm putting in the last of the branches and I'm using the same colors. It's a very wet mixture, so what's going to happen is as these branches dry, they're going to merge in with the colors that are already underneath. The greens and the browns that are there. And they're going to feel very natural. There's a lot of times when you just feel the urge to get either some like really dark Payne's gray or a black to make those tree branches because you see dark in there, but they don't, they don't do anything except sit on top and look really fake. Well with this really thin mixture and the matching colors that you have underneath of all of that already in the canopy, the branches don't get distracting at all. They just melt in as it dries and you'll end up with something that looks much more realistic than you thought you might be able to do. These trees are not as hard as you think. They just take a little time and the right mixtures of colors. I hope this has been helpful for some of you who have been trying to get your watercolor trees to look more realistic, especially in this kind of a detailed style. I'm going to put a link to my World Watercolor Month page. That's my page on my site has all my deals on it, including my trees classes. And these used to be sold as just the full set of five lessons in each one. And some people didn't feel sure they were ready for all five. So you can now take one of them as a tester. And if you decide, yeah, okay, I'm at that level. I can do this. Then all you have to do is sign up for the full meal deal. And I will refund the one that you took as a tester class. More details are on the website so you can see all about it over there. And I will see you again in my next video. Thank you so much. Have an awesome day and keep on painting. July's not over yet.