Learn to Paint Trees in Acrylic

1. Introduction: Hi. Hello, and welcome to Learn to paint trees in Acrylic. I'm Paul Richmond, and I am so excited to welcome you to this course where we will be going step by step from a blank canvas to a finished acrylic painting. One of the biggest benefits for me of going to art school was being surrounded by so many talented artists and getting to see how they worked. And it was fascinating because we could all be painting the same thing, but every single artist approached it a little differently. I think there is a tremendous value in seeing how other artists work, how they tackle that subject matter. Not that you have to follow along and do everything I do. Not that I'm saying my way is the right way or the only way. There are so many different approaches. But my hope is that by painting along with me, you will pick up on some tips and tricks that will help you in your own painting process. In this course, we'll be using just the primary colors, red, blue, yellow, and also white and black so that I can show you how to mix everything you need just from that basic set. Are brand new to painting. This is a great course for you because we are literally going to start from scratch and go through the entire process. But also, if you're a more experienced painter and you're just looking to refresh your skills or maybe pick up some new ideas, this is also a great course for you. Basically everyone. I've been painting my whole life. I started taking lessons from an instructor when I was 4-years-old. I've just always known this is what I wanted to do. I was very fortunate to get to go to art school, study my passion and really make it into my career. I've had the privilege of displaying my art all around the world. I've even been commissioned by some celebrities like Troy Sevan and Dolly Parton. But my favorite thing to do is to teach and share my love of art with other people. Are you ready to get started? Let's go. 2. Project: The project that we'll be creating together is this acrylic painting of a tree. I'm using a nine by 12 inch canvas. You can use whatever size you want, and we will literally be going from start to finish. So a blank white canvas is all you need, and then by the end, you will have a beautiful masterpiece. Along the way, we'll be learning about a variety of topics, including how perspective changes when you're looking up at a subject. How to create a strong sense of composition, mixing rich natural colors from just a few basic primaries, building layers of light and shadow to create depth and using expressive brushwork and even the palette knife to capture atmosphere and texture. All right. Let's do this. 3. Materials: You're welcome to use any painting materials that you would like for this project, but let me share with you what I'll be using. I have a nine inch by 12 inch canvas, a basic set of acrylic paints, including white, black, and the primary colors, red, blue, and yellow. Assortment of inexpensive paintbrushes of various sizes, a palette knife for mixing colors, palette paper to put paint on, a cup of water, and some paper towels, and the reference photo, which I'm providing for you. And that's it. So go gather your supplies, and let's get started. 4. Painting the Blue Sky Background: Hi, everyone, and welcome to earn to paint trees and Acrylic. I'm Paul Richmond, and I am really looking forward to going through this painting process with you. In this lesson, we're going to start out by painting the blue sky background. So let's do it. My first step is to look at the reference over here, and I'm going to kind of cover the whole canvas with just the sky color, and then I'll start building up other things from there. So I'm going to use some of my primary blue and some white. And let's see I I need all of that. So if you've never used a palette knife before, it's really good for mixing your paint. You just scoop a little bit of one, scoop a little of the other. I always start with a small amount of the blue first because it's not going to take a lot to darken it. So try and get, you know, a color that looks right to me. You can make it whatever shade of blue you want. If you're trying to match the color in a reference, sometimes I'll put a little paint on the knife and then hold it right in front of that area of the photo to see if it looks close. It does. I think I'm pretty happy with that. The sky in the photo is just a little bit has just a touch of red in it. I don't know if you can see that or not. But it just takes a little bit of the edge off of it. We don't want to make it purple. I mean, I'm talking, like, just a drop of red. It'll be a subtle difference, but it will help. Now, the other thing I see when I look at that photo is that there's this little area at the top where the sun is making a glare. And so the sky actually gets a little bit lighter as it approaches that part. So I'm going to take a little bit of that color that I just mixed and add some more white to it so I can make that part. Okay. Now, let's paint. I'm gonna use my biggest brush because we're just covering the canvas. Get some water. Get water a little closer. I like to wet it down a little bit so that that will help it to cover better. Thins it out a little bit, too, so it'll dry faster also since this is just our base coat. So I'm painting the darker blue probably along the I would say the bottom, two thirds of it. Then I'll switch over to the lighter blue. And you can just make it blend in with the darker blue by using your brush. As long as the two colors are wet, you can make acrylic paint blend. Once one of them dries, then that's when you kind of get that hard edge when you try and put another color next to it. So you just have to go back and add a little bit more of that color to it too. But I kind of use these criss crossy brush strokes that makes it blend pretty nicely. Camouflage is the direction of the strokes a little bit, too. So if you want that, if you want a little bit of a smoother look, you don't want it to look really brush stroky then that's one way to accomplish that. But I also sometimes really like texture and like for it to look really brushy and to see the direction of the strokes. So see what happens. Okay. Then I'm just going to go ahead and go back over this bottom part again with a little bit more of the darker blue to fill it in where it looks a little too thin. I don't want to have to worry about trying to remix the color later. Look at that. I gorgeous blue canvas. We could just say it's done. All right. It's hard to tell in the photo when you first look at it because you really those sections are broken up by all those branches, so it kind of looks like it's just the same blue everywhere. But if you look at the very bottom of the photo and then you look all the way up to the top, you can see there's a pretty strong difference between the two. That's one of the That's one of my favorite things about painting, especially like painting something, you know, when you're using a reference like this, is that it really makes you stop and look so much closer at things than you normally would. I, you know, would just normally think, Well, sky's blue. But when you're painting it, you have to ask other questions. What shade of blue? How dark? How light is it? Just makes you slow down and appreciate things a little more. Great job. Alright, we are off and running. Now, in our next lesson, we're gonna start sketching out the tree. I'll see you then? 5. Sketching the Trunk: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to earn to paint trees and Acrylic. I'm Paul Richmond, and in this lesson, we're going to start sketching out the tree. Let's get started. Okay, so next, I kind of want to have an idea of where at least the main branches are. So actually, what I will do is just use the colors that I have out here. I'll just make a slightly darker sky color. So I'm just mixing a little bit more of the blue in with my sky. And I'll use that to just draw some lines for the tree. You can use whatever color you want. It really doesn't matter. But this will all get covered up. This is just kind of a sketch. This is just another way of sketching with paint, rather than with a pencil. So I'm going to use this little bit smaller brush. But it's still, you know, got some width to it. I think it's maybe a half inch. Because I like drawing with these kind. So now the main thing to notice if you want to have that feeling of looking up at the tree, that perspective, the way that you achieve that is by remembering that things get smaller, the farther away from you they get. So even though we know that this tree trunk is actually probably about the same size here as it is here, maybe it narrows a little bit. But the way that we see it is a really dramatic enlargement, and that helps us understand the perspective. So I'm going to start by just figuring out where I want the trunk to be at the bottom of the canvas. I'm just going to make some little marks for that first. So I'm going to put mine here. And again, however you like to draw, if you're more of like, I just want to get in there and draw some squiggly lines and do it that way, go for it. I'm kind of mapping it out because I want to especially if there's people watching who haven't done a lot of drawing, I want to give you sort of an easy way in to orienting yourself. It can be a little overwhelming when you're looking at an empty canvas. So another thing I'll do is I'll look at my reference, and I'll try to figure out, you know, maybe where's the halfway point? I'm even going to put some little dots here on it. So that's about halfway on the vertical side. And this is about halfway horizontal. So what you're doing is kind of creating an implied grid for yourself. So if we do the same thing here, there's the vertical. Is the horizontal. Then you can figure out where you want to end that part of the tree trunk, which is a little bit below the halfway point. So I'm going to go to the halfway point, then come down a little bit, and that's about where I'm going to have the tree start to branch off. And I'm going to make it about let's see. At like that. The lines don't need to be too straight or too perfect, remember, 'cause it is a tree trunk. Actually, if it's a little has a little bit of character, that'll be better. Alright. Then I'm going to work on this big branch that comes up this direction, and it always helps me to have an idea of where I'm going instead of just being aimless. So I'm going to look at where this branch ends up, which is all the way up in that top right corner. So I'm going to make a little mark up there. That tells me where I'm headed with it. And then I know that it's going to swing over this way a little bit. And then it basically goes vertical and then diagonal, and then it kind of bends again a little bit more there. But the main the main lines are vertical and then angle to the right. So I'm gonna go up and then over. And then like that. Don't get too hung up on making it exact because it doesn't matter. It's a tree. It can grow anyway it wants to. Alright. And then just like with the trunk, the branches will also get smaller as they get farther away from us. And that's also just something that branches do. I mean, they do get smaller as they move away from the tree. So we've got this little piece that comes out here. Gonna make the branch about that thick and then come up. I'm not going to worry about any of the things branching off of it yet, getting the main the main branch first. And that's kind of a good thing to think about, actually, because when it comes to drawing something that's more complex, it can be easy to get distracted by all the little things, you know? And I'm guilty of that, too. I'll see all those interesting little branches and leaves and all the shapes, and I'll want to start working on all that. But if you don't get a sense of the overall first, the bigger pieces that really affect the layout of things, then you can easily get lost in the weeds or the leaves, whatever you're painting and lose sight of the whole. Alright, so now this branch comes over and it looks like it's about halfway between there and there. So about a quarter of the way down is where that one ends up, and it goes up and over and over. Bens. You know, just get a little whiter as it comes down. Got like that. Gorgeous. Awesome work. Okay, we're not quite done with the sketching yet, in our next lesson, we're gonna move on to the branches. I'll see you then? 6. Sketching the Branches: Okay. Hi, and welcome back to Learn to paint trees and acrylic. I'm Paul Richmond, and in this lesson, we're going to continue sketching out the tree moving on up to the branches. So let's get started. Alright, now, I'm just going to quickly sketch in a few of the other branches. And the main reason I'm doing this right now is because I want to have a sense of where to put the leaves. So we're gonna there's one that comes off from over here, and then it ends up about here. I'm not even going to draw the two sides. I'm just going to use my brush and paint the whole branch because that's quicker. And you can put the branches anywhere you want. Branches are when you're drawing or painting a tree, branches are like wonderful little design elements that you can adjust. If you want to have the viewers eyes moving around in a particular way, you just put some branches to lead them. Look at the picker one here. This one comes down like this. I'm still not doing the super tiny ones. I'm just getting the main the main ones. I like this one here that kind of starts off, but then it's like, nope, change mine, going back. Okay. Then we've got this little knob there. All right. Well, that branch got all messed up, but that's okay. Um, Oh, this big one here that goes about toward the center. And gonna do this one. That's just about enough, I think. Smile. Yeah. That gives me a good sense of where the main the main branches are. Enough to start laying in some leaves and then we'll come back and really paint the branches. Alright. If you haven't used acrylic before, you want to make sure and clean out your brush really well in between colors, especially if you might not be using that brush again for a while, because the paint will dry on there. So just swirl it around really good. In the water and then dry it off on a paper towel, get all the water out of there and kind of shape it back the way it's supposed to be. And then it'll be good and ready for next time. Otherwise, the paint will dry and the brush will harden, and then it's not gonna be too fun to work with. Although those kinds of crusty brushes are good for some things, they still have their purpose. Alright. Are we ready for some more fun? So, since I'm mixing my green, I've already got most of the colors I need for that because green is blue and yellow and white when we want to lighten it. So I'm just going to add some yellow to my palette. And if you look at that photo, the leaves, there's a range of values in those leaves. There's areas where they're pretty dark. When I say values, that just means the light and dark in the image. So there's areas where it's pretty dark. And then there's areas where it's almost pure yellow where the sunlight is really hitting it. So I'm going to mix a few different shades, and I'm just going to take the colors that I had here that I was already working with and add some yellow to them and see what that gives us. Okay. That's not bad. I want to get the darkest green first, so I'm actually going to add some more of the dark blue into that. 'Cause if you look, that's a pretty dark green. Now, what's happening, though, is by adding all of that blue, it's making my green turn very cool. And the green in the reference is warmer. So I'm actually going to add a little bit of red, not much, but just a little bit of red, and that will help counteract the green a bit. Red doesn't get to play a big role today. It's just we're just adding little touches of it to help us out. And I'm going to add some more yellow also. Color mixing is a whole other aspect of painting that you could just spend forever on. And it's really, I think, a lot of fun, but it can be frustrating, too, if you're trying for something specific and you're not getting it, and you just have to keep looking at what you have and then holding it up to what you're trying to get and seeing what it needs. So my color feels a little too, like, right out of the Creola box right now. So I'm going to add a little bit of black to my palette also. And throw a little of that in there and see what happens. There we go. That's what it needed. That kind of neutralizes it a little and just makes the color feel a little bit more complex. Okay, I like that green. Give me a little more red. This is where I can get obsessive, so I'm going to stop myself. And then I'm going to take this lighter one and mix some yellow in with that, and we'll get our highlight color. Use lots of yellow. Just a touch of red and that one too. Okay. I'm actually going to just put out some more pure yellow also because I think it might be nice to even just hit a few of the areas with just some yellow, maybe mixed with, like, a little bit of white, for those areas where we want real strong highlights. There we go. So see how I have before I even started painting, I have three different shades here that will help me to get the effects of light and dark on the leaves. Now, some artists would rather just mix one shade and then have some white and maybe some black on their palette and sort of mix with their brush as they go, too. That's completely valid also. But I like to for me, it makes it easier to just mix it before I start. So I know I like the colors. Good to go. Beautiful job. Okay, this is coming along, and now it's time to start pining on the tree. And the next lesson, we're going to be laying in some dark tones for the leaves. I'll see you then. 7. Dark Tones on the Leaves: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Learn to paint trees in acrylic. I'm Paul Richmond, and in this lesson, we're going to start laying in some dark tones for the leaves. Let's get painting. Alright, I'm going to use my big brush again because I don't want to get too fussy with the leaves. I want to just kind of paint them on and let the brush do most of the work. So I'm going to start with the dark and I'm going to start down here in this bottom corner and see how I'm just kind of using the brush in all these different directions so it builds up a little texture. I'm not trying to make it super smooth. Holding the brush in different ways gives you different shapes. So take advantage of that. Anything that makes your life easier, I think is a good thing. You could also do leaves with a palette knife, too, if you want a thicker painting. I think I'm going to save that for the trunk for right now, anyway, we'll see. So I'm going to go through and do all the dark first, wherever I see big clumps. I'm not totally I want to preserve some of the sky, though. So kind of keep an eye on where you see the biggest areas of blue and make sure you leave some for yourself. Doesn't have to be in the exact same places. And the leaves tend to be kind of thicker clumps as they, you know, move in towards the tree, and then as you get out towards the very tip, then they just get a little more sparse and you see more sky showing through them. So this is a fun way time to just experiment with how you hold the brush, how much paint you put on the brush. So you see when I first started, I was using a lot of paint. And then up here, it's a little more of a dry brush kind of look where it's you see more of that blue showing through it. I think the main thing is just keep trying new stuff. Because when you're doing something that's a bit repetitive like this, there's a temptation to just kind of do the same thing over and over and over again, but then you end up with a very sad, boring tree. Nobody wants that. No, I just accidentally had a little of the lighter color on my brush, and that's okay, too. You can actually put more than one color on your brush at the same time. That can give you some interesting effects. But I want to be I want to build up from dark to light mostly, so I'm not going to do that on this one, but if you get other colors in there, it's okay. And if you end up covering up too much of your sky and you want bring more of it out, you definitely can. You can just mix up that sky color again and go right on top of the leaves and paint more negative spaces. That's what those are called. When you're painting something, the positive space is the subject and the negative is the space around it or behind it. And you always want to be thinking about the balance of the positive and the negative space in your artwork, because that's a really helpful compositional tool. It helps you to actually think about your work more abstractly. So instead of just looking at it and thinking, I'm painting leaves and branches and trees right now, if you get that out of your head and you think, I'm painting positive and negative space, and what kinds of shapes do those make, that's a really helpful way to just go a little deeper with it. There's a lot that realistic painting and abstract painting actually have in common. I think that painters who are painting something representational, like a tree can really learn a lot from abstract art because it's great if you can make something if you can paint a tree and make it look like a tree, but how does it work as a painting? Do you know, does it move your eye? Does it have interesting colors and textures and all of the things that you would talk about if it was an abstract painting and you weren't busy talking about what it was, you know, like, Oh, that's a tree or that's whatever. If you take away the subject, there's still a lot to talk about. And actually, that's usually what's more interesting. Okay, getting some more leaves there. I'm going to come back at the end and do that glow at the top, so don't worry about that right now. Just put the leaves up there, and then we'll do something called a glaze over top of it to make it glow. That'll be fun. Don't be afraid to let the leaves go right inside of the tree, too. I should have said that sooner. But it's better to do that than to try and avoid it, and then you end up you know, looking like there's a halo around the trunk or the branches, the brown will completely cover up the green. So we're just going behind some of those branches right now. You're not painting on top of them, really. You're just going behind them. And when I'm painting a landscape, I usually do like to start in the back and work my way forward. So like we did today, starting with the sky and then laying in where the leaves go, and then we'll do the trunk and the branches, lots. Alright that feels pretty good to me for my darks. Great job. This is coming along. And our next lesson, it's time to move on to the mid tones for the leaves. I'll see you then. 8. Midtones on the Leaves: Hi. Hi, and welcome back to Learn to paint trees and Acrylic. I'm Paul Richmond, and in this lesson, we are going to be painting the mid tones of the leaves. So let's get to work. I'm going to go ahead and move on to my middle color now. And I'm looking. You don't just want to cover it everywhere. You want to sort of leave the dark more prominent in the areas where it looks more prominent in the reference. You can squint your eyes when you look at it. That's something that I do a lot, and it really helps me to not focus on the details so much. So I see there's a lot of light over here. So I'm going to start there. And the dark green is still wet, so that's really nice because then it doesn't just look like I'm layering or laying this lighter color on top, but I'm actually kind of it's able to blend in a little bit with it. And I'm adding some. I'm letting it go out past where the dark ended in some spots. See how just doing that little bit, it starts to feel so much more dimensional already because light and shadow is sort of the main tool for giving anything in a painting a sense of volume. If you can show how the light is hitting it, then we start to understand the shape better and the planes of it, the structure of it. It goes from being a flat form to having dimension. How are your trees coming? Are they looking beautiful? Yeah. With painting like this, acrylic painting, and oil painting, it's really all about the layers, even watercolor, in a little different way, but I mean, you layer watercolor too. But I think that, you know, with more opaque paint like this, it's really cool to just be able to, like, go on top of a dark and add a light and pull out that highlight. You're never stuck with anything. Whatever you start with can completely change by the time you get to the end of the painting. And that's that's very freeing and makes it very fun. Acrylic paint does dry. I mean, normally, I paint with oils and so you have forever. Well, not forever, but you have a long time. But with acrylic, it will dry on your palett. So usually it will last if you're actively working with the paint, you know, and moving it around, it'll last a couple of hours. It might start to get a shell on the top, but you can push scrape that aside and keep going. But if you have a squirt bottle or spray bottle and puts just some water in it, you can just kind of miss your palette, and that will keep it wet longer. They also sell this special palette for acrylic painters that has a sponge underneath it. So it's a tray, and then underneath then there's palette paper, but then underneath the palette paper is this big sponge that is the same size as the whole tray. And so you wet the sponge before you start, and then that keeps the paint alive longer. In fact, you can put the lid on the tray and come back to it the next day and still work with those colos. But what I've started doing, I hate wasting paint, and, you know, you never know exactly how much you're gonna need when you start out. So at the end of a painting session, if I don't have another canvas to put it on or don't have another use for it, I bought this big sketchbook that has heavy paper in it, and I've just started taking my extra paint and smearing it on the pages in the sketchbook and making a little abstract paintings, and then I'll come back to those pages and maybe draw on them or write on them or do different things. And it's really fun because then I don't feel like I'm wasting the paint. I end up with this kind of chaotic, you know, base that I can, you know, work on later in my sketchbook. So nothing ever gets wasted if you find something to do with it, or if you just have an extra canvas that you can throw your paint on whatever's leftover at the end of the day, do that. Okay. You know, looking at a reference and trying to figure out where is the light actually coming from that does help you to know, you know, where to put those shapes. It's not always when you're painting leaves, it's not always incredibly obvious because the leaves can go in so many different directions. So, you know, I'll have there's a clump up here that looks pretty dark, which is not what I would expect since that's toward the top where the light source is. But things don't always happen in a way that feels like how you would make it up. So that's a good thing, though, of looking at a reference. If you just paint what you see and don't overthink it, it'll feel right. Light does really unusual interesting things sometimes. It creeps around and gets into little areas where you wouldn't expect it to. Awesome job. Okay. Let's keep going. And the next lesson we are going to be doing you guessed it the highlights on the leaves. Maybe you guessed it. I don't know. I'll see then. 9. Highlights on the Leaves: Hello, and welcome back to Learn to paint trees in acrylic. I'm Paul Richmond, and in this lesson, we are going to be painting the highlights on the leaves. Let's get to it. Now I'm going to go in with my super light color. This will be fun. I might actually go down to a little bit smaller brush because the areas where I'm going to use that are a little bit smaller. I don't want to cover up everything I just did. So I'm gonna go with this half inch one again. Okay. You might not need much water. By the time you get to the more yellowy color, yellows tend to be a little bit thinner, so it's already going to be kind of runny anyway, and it won't cover too well if you get it too wet. Oh, yeah, I love. Look at how just getting those little bits of the light in certain areas comes to life. If you do happen to have any old dried out rusty brushes, they're great for making leaves like this. You don't even have to work as hard to get the shapes to feel different because the bristles are all going in different directions, and it's gonna look different anyway. So save those brushes when you do forget to clean them out at the end of the day because they are still good for some stuff. I used to only work with really cheap brushes like this. And I still do a lot of that because they work just as well, honestly. But an artist, a local artist gave me a ton of brushes. I mean, just, like, hundreds of brushes 'cause he's not doing oil anymore. And they're really nice, like, expensive brushes. And I was almost afraid to use them because I'm so messy and hard on my materials. But so I've just started being really good now about cleaning out my supplies I feel like, Well, he gave them to me, so I've got to take care of them. It's a lot of pressure. All right, so just getting in these last little bits of highlights here, and then we'll move on to the trunk and the branches. I love the way that it looks when you start to get the enough light in there that it really feels like it's starting to flow. Up here, I see more dark, so I'm not going to do too much. A little over here. If you're painting on a canvas like I am, you can even sort of take advantage of the texture of the canvas. That can give you some nice leafy texture if you just put a little bit of paint on your brush and kind of dry brush it. It won't cover solid. I'll leave lots of little cracks and crevices from just the canvas texture. So use all of that to your advantage. If you don't like painting on canvas, though, you can paint acrylic on well, just about anything. You can do it on heavy paper. Like watercolor paper is really good for acrylic painting. You can paint on wood, like masonite panels. Just if you prime them with gesso first, they take the paint really well. If you want no texture at all. That's a really good way to go. Or you can even take a canvas like this and before you start painting, put a few extra coats of gesso on it, and then sand that and you'll get a really smooth surface. The gesso is just kind of like another layer of acrylic paint, basically. And if you put a few coats of that on there, it builds up to where it completely camouflages the canvas the weave of the canvas. And it does feel different when you paint on a smooth surface compared to this. It's worth trying to see if you like it. There's also different kinds of canvas, too, most of the time, especially if it's a more inexpensive canvas, it's probably cotton, which is totally fine, works great. But if you want a really smooth, kind of almost, like, I don't know, silky feeling to the canvas where the paint just, like, glides across so smoothly. I know I'm really selling this here for some reason. Belgian linen canvases are wonderful to work on. They just have they also have just a very different feel to them. A little more expensive, but you can use old sheets. You can stretch them over. You can actually buy just the wooden stretcher frames, if you want, like what's on the back of your canvas, and you can put those together and then stretch whatever you want over it. Or you can just take the sheet and use a staple gun and staple it up to the wall. And then once your painting is dry completely, you can take it off and even roll it up to store it, and it'll be completely fine. And if you're painting on fabric and you actually want to maybe it has a pattern on it or a color or something and you want to incorporate that, clear go. So it's the same stuff that is normally white that you would prime the canvas with, but it's clear, so it'll preserve what's on there, and then you can still paint on top of it. That's also good for collage, too. If you want to collage a bunch of stuff onto the canvas before you start, clear so is good for that. I'm just going back with a small brush now and doing a few little more precise kind of dots and shapes because I wanted a couple of things that I just see some where the light is so strong that it just makes those little clumps of leaves kind of have their own little kind of graphic shape, especially down here at closer to us, little bolder, little more contrast. Great job. Okay, let's move on to the trunk. In our next lesson, we're going to be doing some color mixing and we're going to start laying in some tones on the trunk of the tree. See you then? 10. Starting the Trunk: Hi. Hi and welcome back to Learn to paint trees and Acrylic. I'm Paul Richmond, and in this lesson, we're going to be doing some color mixing, and we're going to start laying in the dark tones on the trunk of the tree. So let's get started. So I'm going to use red. To mix brown, it's going to be There's different ways you can do it, but I'm going to use red, yellow, and black. We'll see how that does. I'll start with a lot of red. Get over there. And a little bit of black. Quite a bit of yellow, because red and yellow make orange, and brown is kind of like dark orange. That's one way to think about it. Yeah, see, look at that. Worked. Yay. I did not lie to you. So there's a good dark. I'm going to do the same thing, like I did with the leaf colors. I'm gonna mix a few shades before I start, and then I'll be good to go. So I've got my dark. I'm gonna do a middle color now. More red. Some more paint. A little bit of black, and then I'm going to add some white to make it a lighter color. Let's see what that gives us. Oh, yeah, that's good. That's a good. There's a lot of warm tones where the light is hitting. It becomes very yellowish, yellowish orange. So when you're mixing colors, like we were talking about earlier, you start you get something, and then you kind of compare it and you look to see, well, which direction does it need to go? And a couple of things you can ask yourself, does it need to be darker or lighter? We've talked about that. Does it need to just be a totally different color? Like, if you're trying to mix, you know, purple and it looks green, obviously, something went awry. Looking at the temperature of the color because every color can have different degrees of feeling more warm or feeling more cool depending on how much of, you know, each component is in it. So if you think about purple, for example, purple can feel really warm. If it has a lot of red in it, it can kind of move towards, like, you know, magentas kind of color. Or it can feel very cool if it has more blue in it. I can feel more like, you know, a nighttime kind of sky type of feel. So every color has different temperatures, so it's just something else to think about when you're mixing. What temperature do I want that? Now, you might have just seen as I was mixing this lighter brown, it went a little green on me, which can happen sometimes because the black has a lot of blue in it, and the blue mixed with the yellow will turn green. So you just mix the opposite of green in it. The opposite of green is red, and that will kill the green, and then it brings it back to brown. So learning a little bit about color can help you if you're trying to get if you're trying to mix certain things, knowing what to add to make it go more toward something or more away from something. Alright, those look good to me. I'm going to start with my big brush. I do want to do some palette knife texture, too, but I like to just kind of get it covered first. And I'm going to block in basically where I see the darks first. I'm going to use my darkest color that I mixed here and just very quickly get those dark areas covered. And I might even grab some black and do some mixing right on the canvas because the dark brown that I mixed isn't quite as dark as I want it to be in some areas. And letting the colors kind of mix on the canvas and not necessarily blending them all together perfectly will give you some nice texture to start to give that feeling of the bark. A lot of people when they're starting out painting, are afraid to use bigger brushes, especially on a smaller canvas like this. So I'll see them students in my class just trying to paint everything with these tiny little you know, detail brushes, and that actually makes it harder sometimes, I think. You can what you can accomplish with one big sweeping brush stroke with a larger brush, you have to do, you know, ten or 20 strokes with the small ones, and it's harder to get any kind of fluidity and, you know, motion, movement with the brush stroke when you're doing it that way. So don't be afraid to use the big ones. Great job. Okay, in our next lesson, we are going to continue painting the tree, moving on up into defining some of the branches. I'll see then? 11. Painting the Trunk and Branches: Hi, and welcome back to earn to paint trees and Acrylic. I'm Paul Richmond, and in this lesson, we are going to be continuing to paint the tree and define the branches. So let's get to work. Now, when I get to the smaller branches, I will go down to smaller brushes, though. Just use whatever's going to help you with the thing you're painting. Which seems obvious. But I know even myself, I will sometimes just get in the habit of I'll start with one brush and then just keep using that cause maybe I just don't want to stop long enough to pick up another one. So I have to remind myself of this stuff, too. The other thing I always have to remind myself of and I never want to do nobody ever wants to do is to take a break and just back away from your painting and look at it. If we weren't on, you know, a time limit here, I would be doing that right now. But it is really helpful at the end of the session. You definitely should prop it up and step away and see how it looks from a distance, and it is going to look totally different to you. When you're right up on it and you've been working on it a long time, you start to lose a bit of perspective with your piece. It can you start seeing, you know, kind of what you want it to be or what you're imagining instead of what's really there. Sometimes you'll get back away from it and you'll look at it and you'll really like it a lot more. And then you'll know that you're on the right track. Sometimes you back away from it and you're like, Oh, my gosh, how did I miss that horrible thing that I just did? So either way gives you some perspective. Taking a photo of your painting and looking at it on your phone is another way to do that, or looking at it reflected in a mirror is a good trick. I do that one a lot because it disorients you enough to where you feel like you're seeing it with fresh eyes. When I'm working from a reference like this, sometimes what I'll do, especially if I'm starting to just get too hung up on something or you know, especially if it's like a portrait or a figure and I'm just thinking too much about what it is instead of looking at the shapes, I will turn my canvas and the reference upside down because then it does because both are still oriented, you know, to match each other, so you can still keep going and match the shapes that you're seeing. That does help me to do that sometimes. That's the good stuff that you get out of classes, I think, then you can really take that and use it and it helps you in your own with whatever you do. Alright, now I'm going to use a smaller brush and get some of those smaller branches. When I'm painting branches, I like a brush that I can pretty much just take one stroke and get the size and shape of the branch that I want. And it's almost like writing in calligraphy, just the amount of pressure you put on the brush and then lifting up so that you get the thicker to thinner lines. See that? If you have a nice little delicate brush like this, it's great for that. I like these slant brushes too. They're great for anything with line. If you're trying to paint the branches and it's just feeling too like the paint's too dry or it's not like gliding along and giving you the line that you want, then you probably need to add a little bit more water to your brush. Just dip it in the water before you start and then get the paint. You might want to wipe a little bits water off, so it's not too runny. But I usually just will dip my brush in the water, wipe it a little bit on the paper towel, and then get the paint, and that seems to work really well. So finding the right amount of water makes a big difference with acrylic, it is a bit more plasticky than oil paint. That's probably the biggest difference besides the drying time. It just has a little bit more of that hard kind of shell edge to it, especially when it starts to dry. So keep it wet if you want it to glide on your canvas. I like painting branches. I think I think anything with wine I enjoy feels like I'm drawing. Now, some of these branches do have those little bits of light hitting them, but I'm just going to get the dark on there first, and then I'll go back and do the highlights, kind of like we did with the leaves. Remember, they do not have to go exactly where they are in the picture, Let your branches grow wherever they want or wherever you feel like it needs it. Awesome job. Okay, in our next lesson, we are going to be adding even more branches and more detail. I'll see you then. 12. Painting Branch Details: Hi. Hi and welcome back to Learn to paint trees and acrylic. I'm Paul Richmond, and in this lesson, we're going to be adding some more branches and doing some more detail work in the branches. So let's get to it. Sometimes branches will disappear into a clump of leaves and then show up again a little bit later too. That will help to make it feel a little more integrated than if it's all just continuous lines. So, you know, maybe do a branch, let it kind of trail off, and then maybe you see it again a little bit over here, over here. They don't all have to be perfectly connected, in other words, and, like, you know, perfect spider web of lines. They can kind of break off and show up again. M. Okay, look at how this is starting to really come to life now with all these little branches. I love that. That's just, like, such a nice touch. And you can even just take your little brush like this and just make little just to kind of, like, lay it there flat on the canvas and get these little tiny lines, too, just to create one more one more even more distant tiny type of branch that shows up. Okay. I'm very excited to paint the trunk of the tree, but I'm going to do all these branches first. This would also be something that could be good to do with a paint pen. If you've ever used Posca markers, they're just acrylic paint loaded into a pin, and they're great for doing liny things. So if you got the right color, you can go in and draw the branches with that. Okay, then I do see some over here that are probably coming from another tree. I need to put that into, give a little bit of background to our scene. Okay, that's feeling pretty good to me. It seems like almost every artist, we always appreciate everybody else's style and, you know, the individuality of their work and seeing the way different artists see the world and the marks they make and stuff. But then when it comes to our own work, it's always like we always have a harder time appreciating the things that make our work unique, the specific kinds of marks that we make. We always, I think, compare our work to other artists and think it should look like somebody else's. We judge ourself, but then we see everybody else's work, and we think, Oh, wow, I love that they did this, you know, unusual thing. But then if we did that same thing, we'd think, Oh, that looks that's a mistake. It's very strange. All right. Fantastic. This is coming along. It's starting to shape up and look like a tree, right? In the next lesson, we are going to be blocking in the rest of the tree trunk. I'll see you then. 13. Blocking in Tree Trunk: Hi, and welcome back to earn to paint trees in acrylic. I'm Paul Richmond, and in this lesson, we're going to be blocking in the rest of the tree trunk. Let's get to it. I'm going to move on and do some the rest of the trunk now. Just block it in, at least, get the colors blocked in. I always kind of use that expression blocking it in because I think it takes the pressure off. When you're painting, it can feel like you have to make everything look perfect on the first go, and that's usually not how it works. So just think of it as covering the canvas or blocking it in or whatever you have to call it in order to not stress out about it. Because, honestly, you cannot even really judge, especially the colors in a painting or the values or anything that's relational. You can't judge it until the whole canvas is covered. I mean, look how different this trunk is looking just now that I'm even getting some of this middle color on there. It completely changes. And that's because color is so relative. It looks one way when it's next to one color, and then it looks totally different when it's in a different context. So I always just consider the first pass of a painting to be free for all most likely everything's going to change unless, you know, something is there that I really love and surprised by. But basically, get it on there, don't judge it. Don't worry if it doesn't look good. Just keep going. I've just noticed that especially with a lot of people when they're first starting out, they judge their work so harshly, especially at a way too early of a stage for that and kind of get almost like they just can't even move forward because they hate their painting so much already, but they haven't even given it a chance. So just cover the canvas. That's all we're doing. Now, as I'm painting this tree trunk, I'm looking closer at the photo, and there are a lot of the browns that I've mixed, and I see them in there. But I also see other colors in the tree trunk, too, and we'll layer some of those in. Also, I see some greens. In there, especially in the highlights, some warm greenish tones. And then in the shadows, I see some dark blues, and it's interesting and also makes a lot of sense that those are the colors that are showing up because another interesting thing about color is that it's very reflective. So even though your brain will say a tree trunk is brown, when you look at a real tree trunk, it's going to also be reflecting whatever colors are in the environment around it. So the environment around this tree has a lot of greens and blues. That's what's showing up you know, mixed with the brown in the trunk. And it's subtle. You might not even see it at first. You have to look closely. That's a big part of painting is learning how to see, learning how to slow down and really look at something and see beyond just what you think you know about it and appreciating all of those subtle things and then putting them in the painting so that you get to help the viewer to see those two. I'm just coming up and hitting a few of these bigger branches with this middle color where I see some light hitting. Okay. So now I've got my tree mostly covered. I want to come back with my white color now. When I squint my eyes and look at the reference, the lightest patch is right here. So I'm going to go ahead and block that in while it's still wet, and that way, it'll kind of blend with the middle value and see how it just starts to feel like, Oh, look at that light hitting that tree right there. And because that creates more contrast, contrast is just, you know, when you have two extremes of anything side by side, when we have strong light against strong dark, it tends to come forward. In the painting. So when you are painting something like this, where you have that dramatic sense of perspective, and you want, obviously, this part down here that I'm painting now is closer to us than anything else. So getting those extreme value contrasts happening there will just help with that. See how just putting that little bit on there kind of pulls that chunk forward. Don't feel like you have to overly blend everything. Sometimes just laying a brush strug down and leaving it works better than going in and mushing everything to death. It doesn't all have to be, like, a perfectly blended smoothie. Leaving a little bit of an edge and more chunky brush strokes, especially with something like this that has a lot of texture will make that texture more believable. But even when you're painting something that is smoother, well, I keep kind of going back to this, but like painting a figure, I will always start out with chunkier, blocky kinds of brush strokes because that makes me think more about the structure of it. If you try and just blend it all too much right up front, then you lose that form, and it just becomes very it just feels a little too, like, wishy washy. It doesn't have any substance to it. Doing some dry brushy things too. Just trying to think of all different kinds of ways that I can make the sorts of textures that I want on here. Getting those little patches of light that hit the branches. I'll come back with a smaller brush and do that on some of the smaller branches, too. Great job. All right. In the next lesson, one of my favorite things, we are going to be adding some texture to the painting with the palette knife. I'll see you then. 14. Palette Knife Texture: Hello, and welcome back to earn to paint trees in Acrylic. I'm Paul Richmond, and in this lesson, we are going to be adding texture with the palette knife. Let's do it. If you've never painted with a palette knife, I highly recommend you try it at least once. It's not for everyone. Um, some people hate it. Melissa, for example, Which is why I love doing it when we teach together. But you take your knife, and I like for a small painting like this, I like these narrow knives that are kind of pointy. But I have a whole bunch of different palette knives, you know, in my collection that work well for different things. On a big canvas, I'll even use, like, squeegee type things, anything you can move paint around. But for a small canvas, you're gonna want a little bit smaller knife, most likely. And then you just take your cut loader. And scoop a little bit of it up, kind of put it in it, maybe letting it go more along one edge like that. And then wherever you want some extra texture, you just put that on and kind of drag. What I like about it is it gives you this little it's kind of more, I guess, a more organic mark, less controlled. When you paint with a brush, you know, usually the paint, it's gonna go where you move the brush, obviously. But when you're painting with the knife, I never know exactly what it's gonna look like. And I like that sometimes, especially for painting something like this where you want that really rough look. And you can go as thick as you want with it. I'm not going to go super thick on this one. I want it to still kind of match the look of the rest of the painting. But some of my paintings where I go really heavy with texture, the paint can, you know, be in globs on the canvas. I love that. It's fun. We'll probably do something like that at some point, too. But even just dragging it along, it just kind of scuffs it up a bit, makes it feel a little less contrived. I like that. This is also a good chance to start working in some of the other colors. So I want to start with the greens. I'm just going to take some of this dark green that I had already mixed up for the leaves. I'm going to mix a little of the brown in with it so that it won't feel too out of place. That'll be a great color to just come in. I'm looking at the reference to see where I see a lot of green, and it's mostly in the shadows. This darker green shows up. So I'll layer some of that in. I still feels natural. It doesn't feel out of place. You can really have fun with color when you're painting. If you have the values right or, you know, if you have the arrangement of light and dark in the middle tones, where they need to be to create the form that you want, you can really push color. You can use very exaggerated even invented colors. And it will still feel very believable because the value is what creates the form, and the color is just kind of like a fun little extra. And I enjoy doing that in some of my more expressive paintings just really, you know, using every color I can think of. If I was going for that approach with this tree, I might start incorporating more like purples and other cool tones in the shadows and then yellows and oranges in the highlights, and it would give it a really interesting dynamic feeling. It's fun to play with that. Don't be afraid of using unexpected colors. Now I'm going in with some dark blue. I took some of the blue and mixed it with black, and I'm just going to go into the shadows with that. Look at that. That gives it a nice sharp, crisp shadow feel. I'm having way too much fun here. That's perspective. That's a really fun thing to play with in a painting because I just think it's so cool that you can take a flat canvas and make it suddenly feel like it has, you know, it's opening up so much space. And it's mostly just because of the angling of the lines and then also the use of the lights and darks. And everything is affected by perspective, not just things with, you know, straight lines, but, you know, even when you draw people or if you're drawing animals or anything, they will look very different depending on your perspective and how, you know, if you're looking up at them, if you're looking down at them, if you're looking straight on. So it's good to think about it with something like this first. Perspective all has to do with the relationship of what you're seeing with the horizon line. So if you can imagine where the horizon line is, which is the line where the ground touches the sky, in this one, the horizon line is down here below the frame of the canvas. And everything above the horizon line we're looking up at, anything that falls below the horizon line from our vantage point means we're looking down at it. So all of those lines would go in a different direction. So no matter where you are, whether you can see the horizon or not, even if you're drawing or painting something that's indoors, the relationship of that thing to the horizon is what creates the sense of perspective that you see. When you draw like in one point perspective, and you're drawing everything you draw those vanishing points, everything goes back to a line, a dot on the horizon line. Have you done that before? So it's that idea. Everything that is below the horizon line is we're looking down at it, and those lines are all going, you know, up to get to the horizon. And then everything that is above the horizon, the lines have to angle down. So that's why our perspective looks different, it could be the same object, but depending how high or low it is, looks different to us. Perspective is very interesting and can get complicated, but really all you truly need to know in order to paint convincingly is things get smaller as they get farther away and draw what you see, not what you know, sometimes the size of things will be very unexpected because of how perspective is affecting them. Great job. In our next lesson, which is the final one, we're going to be adding the lens flare and some other finishing touches. I'll see you then. 15. Finishing Touches: Hello, and welcome back to Learn to paint trees and acrylic. I'm Paul Richmond, and this is our final lesson. I can't believe we're already here. This has been so much fun, but we're not quite finished yet. We still have a few finishing touches to do, including the lens flare and glow and just some of those little things that are just gonna make the painting pop. So, you ready? Let's go. Okay, doing some more of these little patchy areas of light. I really like I really like that kind of dappled light look. So I want to just come in and especially kind of up in here in the more distant parts, you still see it. You still get that little dappled kind of patches of light. I don't just want it to be a one brushstroke. I want it to feel more like the light is actually falling across the texture of that tree. A few more little touches of light, and then I want to do that glaze up at the top to give us the glow. Got to make sure we save time for that. See how I'm just going back over some of these smaller branches now with my lightest color, and I'm using a small brush. I'm just letting little touches of light. Hit them. Okay. Alright. I might come back and do a little more if there's time, but I'm going to jump up here and do that glow now because that's going to be fun. So when I look at that, I see it almost has kind of a pinkish quality to it, which is interesting. Not what I would expect. But I'm going to do it. So pink is red and white. I'm going to use mostly white we want it to be light. Plus, red is a strong color, and it doesn't take much of it to really start to make an impact. And it is a warm light. So this pink is feeling a little too, like, cotton candy compared to that. So I'm going to put a little yellow in it, also. Not too much or it'll turn orange, but we're more like peach, but just enough to warm it up smidge. There. That's looking better. Okay. So a glaze, when you are painting is basically painting with more water to thin out the paint, and that allows whatever is underneath it to show. So we're not trying to paint or cover up what we've painted. We're just trying to shift it in some way. So I have a lot of water on my brush. You could pad it with a paper towel a little bit to get the area to dry first. Otherwise, it will mix with what's there and mixing pink with green. Since they're opposite colors, it'll just turn muddy and gross. But if you do it as a glaze, it'll be beautiful. I'm just going to go right over top of that whole section. If your paint's too thick, just dip your brush in the water and add more water to it, and then I'm going to dry my brush off and then come around the edges and just kind of softly work it in 'cause I want it to overlap the branches there, too. The branches are also affected by it. Just kind of working in what's there. And then the color gets pretty saturated, so I'm going to actually take a little bit more of the red and a little bit more of the yellow and mix it in. So that is going to go a little more kind of orangish red, but mixing it with the pink because right along the outer part of that kind of glow is where you do see some stronger warm colors. So I'm still going to glaze it. I'm adding more water. But I want to come in now and do another glaze right into that. See how it just pushes that color a little stronger. And then I'll go back to my original one I want to even lighten this part up more. To make something feel like it's glowing, there has to be kind of a transition. It can't just be a light blob and then normal. You have to kind of have the lightest part in the middle and then it blends into something else that's usually a little bit more saturated with color. And then it transitions to the natural color. Now, I'm even going to go back in and paint more solidly, a couple of those branches with the reddish orange really make them feel like they are just being lit up. And I'm also gonna hit the edge of the branches that are a little bit outside of the glow. I'm just gonna let them pick up a little of that color, too so that it doesn't feel too isolated. Just kind of let the colors move. Sure the tree a little bit. There we go. Maybe even over here. Then there's a couple areas where we see some negative spaces in the leaves up there because it's so bright, I'm going to use just white with a touch of that pink. I'm just going to go in and carve out some openings. So I'm actually painting the sky on top of the leaves up there, but I'm doing it in this kind of whitish pink color because that's what color it looks like in that spot where the glow is. So this is definitely an example of painting what you see. I would never think to just start painting pink leaves, you know, on a tree with green leaves. But look at the effect that it gives. It really does start to make it feel like it's glowing. So painting what you see does help. And removing the mental labels that you have for things and not just thinking I'm painting a tree. That's actually the biggest thing that helps me. If I haven't been thinking about this as a tree the whole time. I'm just looking at the shapes and painting the shapes and colors. And then, hopefully, if I do that, at the end, it'll be a tree. Alright. Now, I want to get a little bit one last touch here. Want to just get a little bit of my lighter green and glaze that into some of the lighter parts. There we go. Glazing is a nice way to just kind of add in another little hint of colors to see. So I don't lose any of that texture that I created or the shapes. It just kind of enhances it a bit. And you'd get some nice, like relationships and harmony of color. When colors starts moving through the painting, that's called the color harmony. It's not just a local color, like green leaves, brown trunk, blue sky, but everything feels like it starts to kind of, you know, play with each other. We want to share. So the blue sky is letting a little of the blue come down and be part of the tree, and the greens doing the same. A few more spots with some real beautiful blue. And then I think I'm going to be done. Great job. You did it. We've made it all the way to the end of this painting. I hope that you had as much fun as I did and I hope that you picked up some tips and tricks, some pro tips along the way that you'll be able to pack into your toolcase and use on your own work in the future. Thank you so much for being a part of this course and I hope that you'll come back and make some more art with me again soon. 16. Closing Thoughts: Well, this has been a blast. You are awesome. Congratulations on finishing your painting. Thank you for hanging in there and listening to me Yammer on for all this time. I hope that it's been helpful. I hope that I've shared some insights that you'll be able to use in your future art. And just remember that there are no rules. In art. You can pick and choose what's helpful to you and ignore the rest and also adapt it in your own way. It's never my intention with these classes to say, This is how you're supposed to paint, this is the right way to paint because there's no such thing. But it is very helpful to see how other artists approach things, and it's a lot of fun for me to get to share my process with you. So thank you so much. If you enjoy this class, I hope that you'll leave us a review and also come back and take some more of my courses. I have so many available already and more in the works. Feel free to send me comments too and share your work and let me know what else you'd like to learn? What do you want to paint next? Chat with me. I love hearing from you. Thank you again. Happy art making, everyone, and I'll see you next time.