The Easy Way To Draw A Realistic Tree // Drawing Tutorial Step by Step (With Ink Pens)

Today I'm going to show you the easy way to draw trees like this. To draw this you're going to need a good pencil, eraser and a fine line ink pen and of course your drawing paper of choice. When you're ready you can draw a vertical line to guide you and now you can draw your tree trunk which you can basically make it as thick as you want and add as many branches as you want but I'm keeping it simple here and I'm making just a basic one and to make this look more natural you can add a shaky contour of these lines kind of like your hand is shaking while you draw and just like that we have the base of our tree. Now comes the part that I think most people are scared of because it does look really intricate and complicated to draw it does look overwhelmingly boring and difficult but say last my friend I am here to help make this easy for you. So let's draw some circles like this in different sizes and let them overlap with each other a little bit so like don't draw the circles too far apart from each other and now you can just outline the tree trunk but do not outline the circles let's keep them with pencil for now and now you can cancel all your plans for the next week or the next month because we are going to draw each individual leaf because we have nothing else to do with the rest of our lives right? Since that is not the case and we all have lives to live I hope we are going to take the easier route and draw these little weird lines that follow absolutely no rule except for the fact that they are small and weird they are not straight like dashes they're also not little circles or spirals but just basically something in between you see what I'm doing right? And for now we want to mark those circle shapes with this little weird lines like this so we can erase the pencil marks as soon as we can to keep the paper nice and clean so just go around the circles like this drawing these little lines everything is going to be covered with a more detailed pattern later but for now you just want to have your circles marked for you to be able to create the shadows later and now that our pencil marks are all covered with ink it's time to erase everything so we can start filling the circles with more weird lines more lines more lines lines fill the circle with lines more lines lines lines until you have the whole space filled with this pattern and this is kind of a boring repetitive task I know guys I know but if you want to be good at drawing it it gets boring sometimes it just gets repetitive and monotonous okay it's part of the craft and that's why I suggest you have a great show on the background for you to watch I'm really into my true crime that really gets me going and a tip I have for you is to try to keep calm while doing this I know you might get impatient but you want to try to keep the same speed and the same movement of hands through the whole drawing because if you get bored and start hurrying the pattern is going to change if you start moving your hand faster or slower the pattern is going to change and you want it to be mostly the same throughout the whole space of the foliage also you can start playing with the depth and contrast by making the spaces in between the circles or like where the circles overlap darker than the rest by drawing more lines there and don't be shy just go ahead and make the shadow spots darker like really really dark that's actually what's going to make the tree look realistic in the end trust me add more lines where you want it to be darker and if you think it could be a little bit darker it's because it can okay I don't see what you're drawing right now but I bet you can go a little darker than what you think okay I actually see that in a lot of my students projects sometimes they just need to work on the drawing a little longer and just add more shadows like just make the shadows darker that sometimes just shifts completely your drawing and makes it look so much more detailed and so much more advanced and so much more realistic because the contrast is what creates depth it's what creates the 3d effect that we want in our drawings sometimes like in this case we do right and now we have the main structure of our tree but it doesn't look natural because you can see the circles a little bit still right and you don't want to see them anymore because they already serve their purpose in this drawing so now we're going to add some darker spots in random places trying to deconstruct the circles so just add random shadow spots anywhere you want you can also choose one side to be the light and the other side to be the shadow so in my case I'm drawing the light coming from the right and everything on the left is going to be darker and this is basic rule for you to get your shadows right in your drawings just pick where the light is coming from before you start shading and now that we added our shadows we can no longer see the circles we can add some extra small branches and leaves poking out of the tree like this to make it look more natural and here instead of keeping the weird little lines pattern we are actually going to draw tiny leaves this is a little bit more detailed but remember that in nature leaves would be all over the place they're not like perfectly positioned so no need to be super precise and super like perfect about everything you just want to make these outside leaves a little bit more clearly defined because as you can see as we draw now it seems like everything is made of these little leaves even though the center is made of the weird lines right now that we did these extra leaves around the whole tree I found that I could still intensify the shadows a little more so this is what I'm doing here basically the darker you go the less you'll be able to see those weird little line pattern that we were making before and the more it's going to trick your brain into thinking this looks like a realistic tree it's all about the optical illusion okay also notice I made the left and this part of the center super super dark like almost all black and it looks way better now so again don't be shy or impatient when doing your shadows because the secret to make your drawing seem advanced and impressive and realistic is to make your shadows darker okay I actually think that's true you might not agree with me but try it for yourself and then you tell me in the comments okay okay so moving on let's work on the tree trunk and this is the easy satisfying part of drawing trees because all you have to do is draw these vertical lines in different batches so not super long lines that go from top to bottom but shorter lines over and over like this parallel to each other because this will create a beautiful realistic pattern for the trunk and again to make the drawing look more advanced and realistic just make the shadow side that you defined before darker and also right below the foliage too simple and effective and notice that what creates the depth effect that makes it look 3d is the contrast between these bottom leaves with the tree trunk that's super dark so this is why I like drawing the leaves first and then adding the trunk after now to add a final touch this is very optional but we're gonna make some quick little dashes at the base of the trunk to make it seem like grass this is supposed to be pretty random and imperfect like this you can choose to draw more floor or less floor than me just make sure you create a shadow by adding some more lines like this on the sides that you defined as your shadow side and this is how you draw a beautiful realistic tree with ink this is actually the first time I drew a tree probably since I was a kid I was really scared to do it because trees are very intimidating to draw and I confess I only did it because I had quite a few requests on TikTok to make a tree tutorial I was scared I couldn't do it but I'm happy I did overcome my fear I hope this video helps you overcome yours if you also have one and this is it for today guys don't forget to like and subscribe to this channel also go check out my TikTok tutorials I put so much love and effort in them and I'm loving the way it's turning out also go watch my Skillshare classes for free for 30 days using the link in the description if you want any specific tutorials make sure you comment down below and I will see you soon on my next video bye