3 Minute Basics, Pine Trees in Acrylics

So pine trees are a really popular element to have in landscapes. They can be a little tricky to paint because it's easy to feel like what you're doing isn't working when you're in the middle of it. They're one of those things that often doesn't look good to you until the next day. Now pine trees come in lots of shapes and sizes, but I'm going to show you the easiest kind to make. There's a couple things about the shape of them that you need to keep in mind. First, you don't want your pine tree to look like an umbrella or to have a hat on top. You always want to have a single straight line on the top of your tree. Secondly, make sure you leave spaces between the boughs that stick out to the sides. It's easy to get carried away and fill all that in, but you don't want your tree to look like a solid triangle. So you can decide which brush works best for you, but you're going to want to start by painting in the trunk of the tree. This will help you know where the middle is and where your boughs are coming out from. Then you're going to start painting in the boughs of the tree. Use your darkest shadow color for this. The boughs start small at the top and get a little bigger as you go down the tree. You'll see artists use lots of different brushes for this. Often the corner of a flat foliage brush or fan brush works well. You just want something that has some texture to it, especially on the bottom of your stroke, to make it look like pine boughs that are hanging down. Fan brushes are especially good at giving that texture in the bottom. So if you feel like you didn't get enough texture the first time, you can always go back in and just lightly tap in with some fairly thick paint on a fan brush. You're going to want to experiment on a scrap canvas a few times with this, just to find out what brush gives you the look that you like. Now whatever brush you decide, make sure that the boughs of your tree are not mirror images of each other. You want this to look irregular and natural. This is kind of a foliage tap, so you want to have your paint fairly thick on your brush and your brush dry. And generally you want the boughs to angle down, especially the bigger ones. They get heavy and tend to droop. Now there's nothing wrong with using a smaller brush to paint in the top of the tree, where the boughs are quite small. It's rare to see the bottom of a pine tree trunk, so it's also fine to go in and kind of tap in some more boughs there, just to cover that up. And if your pine trees are growing close together, they'll just merge together at the bottom. So don't worry about trying to keep each one distinct. Now if your pine trees are far away or backlit in a sunset, you don't have to highlight them. But otherwise you're going to want to add some highlight to create some depth. And this part is a little tricky because it can be hard to figure out where to put them. First, make sure you're using thick paint, probably with some white and yellow mixed in, and a really gentle touch. You want to scatter these taps mostly on the side the light's coming from, and it's really important to leave dark areas between your taps. If your tree has really distinct boughs, it's okay to put highlights right on top of those boughs, but you probably want to scatter a few here and there over the trunk to represent boughs that are coming towards us. This is the part where you really just have to trust the process. Pine trees can look really messy when you're painting them, and then somehow they look good when they're done. If you've ever taken a real close look at the pine trees even professional artists paint, there's often a lot less detail there than you think. So take it slow and don't panic if you think it's not turning out. Let it sit for a day or two, and you may come back and be surprised at how good it looks.