🌳 Drawing Trees From Imagination

All right, guys. New subject. Actually, this lesson is going to be a big subject, because we are dealing with three. We're going to talk about trees. There's going to be more nature in this subject. I'm going to go over trees, how to analyze and groups all those leaves that you see into simple shapes, and work as a design element, not necessarily drawing the whole, you know, every single leaves. And also, we're going to go over on plants, like some succulents, some flowers, you know, again, using our understanding of perspective and shape analysis, you know, to come up with something that's, like I say, more manageable, and you can sketch it down quickly and also get the essence down. And then third, we're going to talk about composition. I mentioned it before, something that's a very important topic, although it's going to be a little, you know, just a little bit of it in this lesson, but because I feel like there's, it's needed, and so I'm going to go over that. I'm going to talk about how to group, how do you design interesting, you know, interesting composition with a type of value grouping, so you can get a sense of separation of the foreground, background, and then, and we're going to paint it, all right. So, here's some examples, again, I have done previously. So, the trees, we're going to talk about, like I said, just grouping more, just more of it, again, shape analysis, not to get anything very specific detail, and, and, but overall, you can tell, you can read, that's the trees, and even what type of, you know, this is the composition. So, this is, this is, so I should just misplace, oh, it's all right. So, this is the composition, which the third, you know, third topic I'm going to go over. We're going to do a couple just small, like business car size, composition value study, knowing exactly where's the, the middle value shadow is light, and then we're going to, we're going to transfer that, implement that into the painting, because if you don't know at this stage, you won't be able to do this. So, here's, here are some of the plans, and I will show you guys how to, again, not seeing each individual leaves or petals, it's all about overall, overall shape alignments, and, and perspective. Again, more composition, understanding the four, three to four values, understanding the, the major value, the value separations, it's light against the dark, or dark against, dark against the light, or light against the dark, that's, and, and based on that, and then we design into our third value, or, or fourth value, you don't want too many values, it's just not gonna, it's not gonna work, it just gets, it gets confused, and then here a little more, I'll get these all done with gouache, and this is my, my personal, obviously this is not from the demo, I, I did this just on my own, this was, I remember, I think this was a demo, and, and so this forest was a demo, I pick it, I also pick a, a, a picture that also has this, also has these, like tropical forests, I like to paint them, I like, they're just beautiful, I like, I'm more of a forest guy than the oceans, I think ocean scares me, but forest, I like just the green lust, that, that mysterious, the mysterious, mysterious light, and then enjoy painting, it's very complex, you look at a picture reference, even in this, in a real scenario, it's so much, so many leaves, all the stuff coming out left, right, how do you organize it, so you can able to, to, you know, to, to paint it, and able to read, there's still sense of depth to them, all right, so let's, let's begin, I'll put these away, before I get to the pictures, I just want to come in, but I just want to start with something very basic, so generally, this is a pretty simple as you can get, this is some more tree, you can do a more of a triangular shape, if you want, right, so we got the point, and this is the, what we call the crown, and then we had the roots, and then we go to have the branches, and then we have the beak, all the way to the smaller, you know, smaller elements, so like I said, breaking down just a two-dimensional idea, that is a cone shape, that is a, a, you know, a tube shape, so when I, you know, when, when I, when I, when you shade this, or when you're looking at the, you know, the tree in front of you, it's going to get more complex, but overall, it's going to look something like this, and you will say, what does it look like, so you guys, it looks like, you know, it looks like a burrata, or something more like a mushroom, yeah, this is, again, this is an idea, idea in turn, as we're thinking this as a, just a more of a, like a cone shape, the difference is the silhouette, and the difference is whether the transition between meeting where the light meets the shadows, so today, if I break out the silhouettes, and that's easy to do, and then also in the shadow transitions, and I'll dig some hole, and poking out, and I'll, now it's going to start to feel more, you know, I asked some, maybe some more, branches, you're going to feel more like a tree, but like I said, we wanted to look, bypass all those details first, and just analyze the big, you know, big relation, construction, and shape, you know, shape idea, so a couple things you have to also need to know, first of all, you need to know your eye level, most likely, it's going to be on below, your eye level, pretty, you know, pretty low, so you'd probably be looking at a three-point, and a three-point view of this point, and also, you got, like I said, you got branches coming out here, and there, one of the most important thing is, again, we always want to make sure we are trying to avoid symmetries, especially in more of the organic subjects, see how that looks more, you know, more interesting, versus imagine if you put it, even curve the tree trunk, but if you put all the branches equally next to each other, it could be longer, it could be shorter, but see how, just how stupid, how boring that feels, and plus, what happened is, think about the trunk in three-dimensional way, it's, if this, this thing is round, these branches, someone's going to be more, you know, someone's going to be closer to us, you know, some of them are going to be tucked away, some of them are probably going to be more behind, so it's a three-dimensional idea, it's like those clothing hangers, those rack clothing hangers, right, and it goes around it. The other thing you need to know is, also because your eye level, if your eye level is lower, what will you be seeing at the top versus what you can see on the bottom will be a little different too, and if we just, like I said, analyze it, these, all these, the tree has a little, little bushes, little egg, you know, little egg volumes, and I'm going to put them, like, put them right, let me pull right here, I put one right here, and I put one right here, and let's put another one here, well, first of all, you know, the size is different, right, because of the perspective, and also, when you are looking, I'm going to raise, I like to pretend, raise the eye level a little bit, but no matter what, you're going to be way below this leaf, or group of leaves, or bushes, right here, you're going to be more in it, look underneath of this group, a little bit less, and more or less, you're going to be seeing maybe over, almost to the profile, when you meet this one in the bottom, keep that in mind, because that's going to, you know, you're actually seeing it from the actual reference, or maybe if you don't do it out of your head, you will see that, because it's perfected, because that's the, that's the reality, the reality gives you, right, so, you know, and then all these, the other thing you want to know, this crown is basically made by all this little, little individual group, and they usually sit like this, so what happens is, again, when you think this way, if we have a light source coming from one direction, while you are actually shading it, you just, basically, you're shading a bunch of eggs, right, and you like your cast shadow, it's like, you know, it's like, and you get the render clouds, which you should, you know, because they go into, also goes into perspective, and then the one that's close to you, that you're pretty much looking right over it, the further away you see less, like that, all right, and so keep, no, so, so keep in mind, it's, you know, think about, you know, think about, think as a two and three, two-dimensional shape, and a three-dimensional, no, three-dimensional volumes, all right, and be aware of how these branches joins, joins into that tree trunk, all right, let's look at a picture reference, so we got these trees right here, the tree trunk goes all over the place, so I'm using the pick out important one, I see one right here, the long branch is coming down like this, I see this one goes away from us, goes away, and then looks like this, come out a little bit, coming out right here, and they got thicker, they get thicker towards the trunk, it's smaller, you know, goes away from it, the rest of the bunch of groups, and then you also want to capture the gesture of the shape, because they can look different, some can be more, it can look, you can overlook it, look the way that how leaves grow, someone looks more, you know, the overall shape looks more rounded, someone feels their sense of gesture, everything kind of hangs down towards, you know, kind of towards the ground, somehow more of a broken see-through, like a lot of, like, sky holes, some are less, okay, group first, I'm thinking about how the each group step up to the next group, okay, negative space, and then for the one that further away or more higher up, yes, you're going to see some of these leaves, they feel like they're floating, but just the two, they're so small, you can't see, I feel like they are just kind of floating on off to this silhouette, and I'll just kind of check the overall balance, do I need a little more here, let's just add, because nobody's gonna, you know, call on you if you screw up the leaves, so just overall, I want to feel the balance, so I'm going to pretend, why not pretend, looks like the light source is coming off on the right, to all this kind of shadows, looks like, yeah, all this new kind of shadows, you got maybe a little bit of a light right here, you can follow the volume of the trunk, you can shake this way, I can follow, so follow with the, with that gestures, looks all this in shadow too, and use the shadow to, again, wrap around, feel the volumes, give it a sense of volume of the tree trunk, throw some of the branches here and there, I want to give a solid base, so besides going to be thicker overall to the, you know, the, when it comes down to roots, and also the shadow too, and the weight of the contrast, I think that's all right, and then all these little groups, paint them in, think of these eggs, look at the shapes, analyze, look carefully at the shape of the leaves, then how to make it decide how you want to do the shape at the half-tone area, like I said, some be shorter, rounder, in this case, it looks like the leaf kind of, kind of thin and long, I'm always chasing that light and dark graphic separations, design them, figure out the best, you know, good balance, not to every, not to get too heavy, something like that, all right, and then I'll probably, I'm going to extend this, I'm going to crop this, I'm also going to add this, it feels like, kind of leans over to the side, I'm going to get some cast shadow, help to support it, all right, so again, this is actually, you do, if you do environment, I don't, you're actually probably not going to draw a tree that large, and you probably, your tree probably most likely going to be small like this, but it feels like it presents as a tree, right, and then you show this to somebody, they would, you know, they will also, they will also accept that, so let's look at another picture, all right, so I'm going to do this smaller, and to me, it's just a, again, a shape like this, light coming also from the draw into a shadow pattern, you can come across and cut across, you can come in this way, just make it interesting, you can come over here, and then, and then hooks around, coming back like this, because that helps describe this bottom plane, all right, this almost looks like a, like a melon, some type of pear, see, this turned down like this, matter of fact, when I, when you paint, you probably, that's going to be what you're going to start with, take a big, big flat brush, just paint down with the shadow side, paint across a little, you know, a little bit, just to get a little bit, some of the, the group of the down planes, assume the group, and then, and then, you probably mix your, your, your half and then come in and soften, take your brush and soften, and can, again, break out this silhouette, all right, see what we have next, oh, we got one that looks way below, and like I was saying earlier with this right here, well, it's a little hard to see, but let's try it, we got nice, we got a couple round, like a one big round shape right here, this hill goes down, we got more massive shape coming over, follow this angle, they kind of almost feel like overlap to distance, like a blanket covers over, at the big, big shadow right here, and these kind of fall like this, fall to it, to, towards earth, a couple negative space poking out, so I'm looking at this, looking at this gestures, I'm looking at this dimensions going back, I'm looking at this gestures, I'm also looking at this rhythm, so because here's where the rhythm balance, I need, I need a group right here to counterbalance with this, I got big group right here, which is the, the focal point, maybe, right here, and everything falls into, into a distance, so that's my concept, light source coming from above, maybe it's noon time, looks like almost directly above, so I want some thicker shadow at the bottom, and use that, like layering it next to each other, and goes up this smaller,