Step into any painting class for beginners and you will see most people trying to paint trees. Painting trees is among the very first things that new painters learn, particularly those who have interest in landscape paintings.
Note that this is because trees can be painted very easily, provided that the learner follows a set of very simple guidelines.
If you have studied the basics of botany, you must be aware of deciduous and evergreen, the two types of trees. Deciduous trees are climate dependent. They undergo multiple color changes in a year and also lose their leaves in autumn/fall season. This means that painting such trees requires you to adhere to the season of the year depicted in the year. You cannot depict such trees as loaded with leaves in the time of winter! As opposed to this, evergreen trees tend to change slightly, regardless of what is the time of the year.
Second thing is that regardless of what type of tree you are painting, you need to consider the overall silhouette of that particular tree. Run a careful check if you can find any pockets and spaces where you can see light coming through the branches to land. In painting, this empty space is termed as the negative space and if you want your tree to look realistic, you must ensure proper negative space in it.
Third thing in the painting process is to start by painting the trunk of the tree. Note that if you are painting an evergreen tree, you should not paint a trunk that is too big. This is because evergreen trees have so many leaves that they tend to cover most of the tree trunk most of the time. The best choice is to use gray color to paint the tree bark. If you are painting the trunk of a deciduous tree, you will have to be careful about one thing. It is very rare that such trees grow straight up. They tend to branch a lot. Plus you must also consider that as the tree grows, its trunk becomes heavier than normal. This means that it leads to slight bending of the trunk when the weight becomes too much for it to stand straight.
Fourth thing about painting trees is that at the time you paint their branches, make sure that you overlap some of them. The reason is very simple. This is the normal way these branches grow. They tend to intertwine a lot and grow in a cris-cross manner. If you paint them straight, they will look unrealistic.
Finally, when you are painting the leaves of the tree, make sure that you do not color them same but maintain slight color variation in them.
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