Paint Trees on an Oil Painting
Oil painting is done by people for both enjoyment and for profit. Whether it's a hobby for you or you want to pursue a career in oil painting, knowing paint a tree can lead to a diverse set of potential subjects, as you can thereafter paint nature scenes. Painting a nature scene can be done without knowing paint a tree, but sooner or later you'll want to plant a tree in the middle of your oil painting.
Instructions
1. Decide on what kind of tree is going to go into your oil painting and what the season is. If it's an evergreen tree, the colors you'll use for the foliage will be combinations of green. The same is true for deciduous trees in spring or summer. Fall colors of course tend to be much more diverse.
2. You should already have painted the background and everything else that, distance-wise, goes behind the tree, as paintings are painted in order from background to foreground in order to give the painting correct perspectives.
3. Paint the trunk of your tree on your canvas. Squeeze a few shades of brown paint onto the pallet in close proximity to each other. Add a dab of black paint. Lightly mix the paint together, but make sure not to thoroughly mix the paints. Take a filbert brush, load the brush with the brown paint mix, and draw a rough vertical line on the canvas. Remember that tree trunks are not straight lines and should have some slight side-to-side bends. The trunk should thin as it rises and gradually reach a small tip at the top.
4. Paint the branches of the tree. Using the same brown mix of paint, paint branches out from your tree trunk. The branches should be thickest at the trunk and gradually thin to a tip. Branches grow out and up from the trunk. Add smaller branches at various points from your larger branches. Add even smaller branches to these. Branches should be even less straight than the trunk, and generally reach up in order to help leaves catch sunlight.
5. Add shadows to your trunk and branches. Add a little black paint to your brown paint mixture. Use a thin filbert brush to add this darker color to the shadow side of the trunk and branches. This should be a very thin shadow, and be less than half the thickness of the trunk and branches.
6. Create three paint areas on your pallet for the color of your leaves. For each area, use the same colors but in different ratios. The idea here is to create a combination of greens and yellows that will be darker in the back of the tree and in the shadows (and therefore not much yellow), a group of paint that is a little lighter and then a third group that has less green and more yellow and white. Use black paint to make the darker greens and white paint to create lighter green shades.
7. Use a large oval brush to dab the canvas with the darker greens. Dab the brush at the end of the branches, and also in a general umbrella pattern over the tree trunk. Repeat the process with another oval brush with the middle tones of paint. For the lightest color, use a fan brush and highlight the ends of branches and where sunlight will be hitting the tree in the foreground.
