Transcripts
1. Introduction: I think trees are a
great subject to allow us to play around
with stylization. Because as long as you stick
to the general structure, you can abstract and experiment with loads
of different styles and shapes to come up with really interesting
and unique designs. Hi everyone. I'm Sarah Holiday and I'm an
illustrator from Scotland. In my work, I love to
use a lot of color and texture to create really whimsical looking
scenes and characters. I love to get
outdoors as much as possible and explore
the world around me. Nature plays a big role
in inspiring my work. So today's live
class is all about drawing trees and is going to focus mainly on stylizing our drawings using
line and shape. To begin with,
we'll be looking at some common tree shapes and general structures that we can use to inspire our designs. And then we'll move on to sketching various
different parts of the tree using
different lines, styles. And finally, we'll be
drawing with shape, line, and detail to create a series
of illustrating trees. Please feel free to follow along with me in drawing
with Procreate. Or you can also use whatever
you have handy to draw with, like a pencil and paper. I hope that by the
end of this class, you'll have more confidence in illustrating and
stylizing trees and will have picked up a few
fun techniques for experimenting with shapes
and line in your designs. This class was recorded
with participation from the Skillshare
community and I got to interact with the audience
as I was drawing. So if you're ready
to get started, then I'll see you in class.
2. Getting Started: Welcome to this live
class with Sarah Holiday. My name is Jen Hutton. I work at Skillshare on the community team and my
pronouns are she, her and hers. I am so thrilled to be hosting
this live class today with Sarah and excited that all
of you are joining us today. I would like to introduce Sara. Sara, do you wanna
introduce yourself and tell the folks here a little bit
more about what you do. Yeah, of course. So yeah, I'm Sarah Holiday and I'm an illustrator
from Scotland. And in my work I love to
use a lot of color and texture to create really whimsical lucky the
scenes and characters. And my spare time I like to go outdoors a lot and
explore nature. And so that inspires a
lot of my work as well. And that's kind of what
inspired the theme for this class where we're
going to be drawing trees. In the session, we're just
going to be illustrating trees with a focus on shapes
and stylization. And I've divided the
class into three parts. So to begin with, I'll walk you through some commentary shapes. So just give you a primer
on the different types of shapes that we might
see in nature. This is, this will also
help inspire our drawings later on when it comes
to stylizing our shapes. So then we're going to move on to our first
sketching exercise, where we will sketch some
various different parts of the trees using different styles of lines to inspire
our drawings. And then in the last
part of the class, we'll be playing
with shape, line, and detail to create a series
of Illustrator treats. You can follow along with me using Procreate on your iPad. Or you can also use whatever you have handy
like a pencil and paper. Or if you just want to watch me drawing and absorb
the information, then that's absolutely
fine as well. So yeah, that's great. Thank you so much. Do you want to start with
the first part of the work? Yes. So when we think
of drawing a tree, there's kind of a general
structure that we can follow that most
stories have in common, like a thick wooded area
which forms the trunk, which then divides into
branches in some fashion. And then sometimes
you'll see some roots at the bottom of the tree
as well as you can see, I've prepared this sheet of various commentary
shapes just to give you an example of some of the common shapes that
you may see in nature. And obviously, even within
each of these groupings, there can be a lot of variation. But this is really
just to show you that there isn't one way
to draw a tree. And it's helpful to
have a rough idea of some of the basic shapes
as a starting point. And then you can
kind of abstract and diversify your shapes from there to create a bit more interesting
and unique designs. This is not an exhaustive
list of three shapes, but it's a good starting
point that we can use just to kind of
group these structures. So that when you're thinking
of stylizing your shapes, you can pick one
of these and then take it further and abstract it. Or you can take up totally random shape and
make a tree out of it. So if we break these
shapes down even further, and I'll just lower the opacity. So you can see
that a bit better. You can see that with
this round tree, that's your fault tree that
you might draw as a child. It's very basic, but very effective and recognizable
as a tree. You have. The more spreading shapes
which are with the foliage, more spread out across
the top of the tree where the branches makes a
bit more to the sides. And then your oval shape
and then columnar. Just colin CHE,
clinical like a cone, a fast is, the foliage
is narrower at the bottom and then spreads
out towards the top. Weeping shape, I
kinda like to think as a dripping ice cream or chocolate fondue
or something with all the leaves can
dripping down. And the branches kind of dripping with the
weight of the leaves. And then open is when you
have kind of a little clusters of foliage spread out in various
parts of the tree. And you can see the
branch is kind of peering through between
those groupings. And then your pyramid shape
is quite common to see in your conifers and your
pines and spruces. And you'll see them more
in the colder climates. Then your fountain shape is more for palm trees
and tree ferns. Within different
species, there might be more common shapes
that you'll see. But even within species of tree, there might be a
general structure, but there can still
be so much variation and abstraction that you can do. So I'll reference back
to this when it comes to making our final piece. But that's just to give you
a good overview and show you all the different variation
that you might find in trees.
3. Sketching Lines & Branches: Let's go back to the
gallery and let's start on our first exercise. Now. I'm just going to start
a new canvas by pressing the plus button on Procreate. And then I will choose
an A4 sized canvas. But it doesn't really matter
what size you choose. Just as long as you have
something to draw on, we're going to be sketching. So I'm going to Use the Darwin
pencil for sketching with, but it's up to you, whatever you like
to sketch with. This exercise, we're going to
be splitting the page into four sections so that we can
draw lines and branches, trunks and roots, and play around with different
variations of those. So let's just start by drawing a horizontal line to split the
page in half horizontally. And then we can split that half again until we have
four sections. And then I'm just going to label these sections lines,
branches, trunk. For our lines. We are basically just going to kind of go with the
flow and not think too hard about it and
let our hand on the page and come up with
different variations of lines. We can start off with maybe
some just simple carbs, some really scribbly,
messy ones. Straight lungs, zigzaggy,
go crazy and see what your hand wants to do and you don't need to
think too hard about it. And this is also just
a good warm up because it's low pressure
and it just gets our hand moving so we can do
some squiggly types things, currently, weird things, or
some relief flowing lines, or maybe some more
star-shaped planes. So just fill rule
with random lines. There. Is this a warm-up exercise you
do often in your practice? Yeah. But not as structured as usually before I
started drawing, I like to just make
some scribbles and doodles and kind of get all of the scribbly mess out of me before you work on
something of that nature. But I think it's also kind of a good starting point to lead
us into the next exercise. So let's start with
something simple. If you want inspiration
for these branches, you can look at the lines
that you've drawn above. I like to start
with one main line to create the main branch. And then I will draw secondary branches coming off that main branch at
randomized places. I like to keep the
lines kind of similar. So I'll use the same
kind of curving shape language that I've used on the main branch just to
keep everything cohesive. And then once you've drawn
your secondary branches, you can draw some tertiary
branches coming off those. You can just keep building
it up by adding lines onto those other branches until you have something that
looks like a branch. And you can add as many
of these honors you want. I like to keep it
fairly simple and not overwhelm the
drawing many lines. But that's just me
and you can play about with it and see
what you like to do. Another thing I like to
do is kind of thick in the main branch just to
add a bit more interests. And also shows you the kind of growth pattern
of the branch here. So I've taken those
secondary branches. The main branch is going
to be the thickest and then the secondary
branches are slightly thinner and then they get
thinner and thinner as the branch branches outwards. We can basically
do the same thing, but using different
styles of lines. Now, I might want
to make one that's got jaggedy lines in it. So that's my main branch. And then I will draw
some secondary branches that have that same
line style to them. And again, I'm working in that same way by drawing
the main branch and then the secondary branches and then the tertiary
branches and so on. So it creates that kind
of fractal effect. And you can see that
it's very stylized. I mean, you're not
probably not going to see branches that look like
this in real life. But it allows you to add a bit of a different
personality to your drawings. If you can use different
styles of lines, like maybe a flowing
lines will give you a very different field to
something that's kind of geometric looking or really
currently looking for can basically just fill up the rule with different
styles of these branches. Let's do currently one next. I just have a comment. It's really interesting
to me because I know the focus of our workshop today is drawing stylized trees. But you're basically
showing us this kind of foundational structure
for using lines and assembling them together to make these branches with a
thicker stem in the middle. And then people can do
whatever they want to. It's still a very tree-like. Yeah, that's why it's quite fun because there's so much that you can play with even though, like as long as you stick
to that basic structure, there's just so
much that you can experiment with your lives. So the options are endless. I think that's what's so fun
about trees is that they're super easy to like once you
know the basic structure, it's easy to kind
of take that and abstract it and put your
own personality into it, which can be really fun. So basically don't feel or
don't get hung up on what we see in nature are having to copy exactly what's in nature. Let's yeah. Exactly. Okay. I think we have room
for one more branch. What am I going to do? Maybe let's try something
quite straight, bunched up. And hopefully you're
experimenting with your own lines and seeing
what you can do with them. But I mean, if you want to follow along with what I'm doing and just copy
what I'm doing. That's perfectly fine as well. But it is really fun to try
and put your own spin on it. Just see what works. And if something
ends up not working, it's not the end of the world. That's why we're doing this, just to experiment
and try things out. Another thing that can be
quite fun is if you can make, create a shape with the branches by rubbing
out certain areas so I can make kind of a you
can see there's kind of a semicircle shape
that, that's following. But that's something
that I think is easier to do after you've drawn the whole branch
rather than planning out your branches to
follow along a shape. Cool. So if we're ready, I can move on to the chunks now.
4. Sketching Trunks & Roots: Usually when you think
of a trunk of a tree, you just think of this
like straight mass of wood growing upwards and
generally with tree trunks, that is what they're
trying to do. They're trying to just grow upwards and outwards to reach, to gather as much
light as they can. Compete with the other
trees that are around them. But in nature, if
you look at trunks, you'll see that actually
there are some, there's so much variation. You'll see some trunks that
are kinda leaning and some that are really
noted and gnarly, especially in older trees, I've had time to grow
into weird positions. And a lot of chunks will be split up into various
sections quite early on, or they might fork
in the middle. So here we're just going
to draw a few trunks and I'm just going to shade in just with this
hatching method, just to show you the area of the trunk instead of
just showing two lines. But you don't need
to shade it in. That's just to make it a bit
more clear on the screen, we can just try
drawing weird shapes. So Sarah, Just to clarify, what you're saying
is you're just focusing on the shape and the silhouette of the trunk
and not really the texture. Yeah, I've just shifted it
and with those lines just show you where the
bulk of the trunk is. But that's not, that's not a texture and thing that's
just for this exercise. Got em. So don't
worry about that. And you might have some
that kind of split apart into lots of various
branches like this. Or they might, for x. So yeah, they might
twist in weird ways. There's no set rule for this. You can just play around
with forking shapes, twisting shapes, leading shapes. You might see trees
that have fallen over, but there's still growing and things have started to grow. Decide, which can
look quite cool. Again, these are
only a few examples, but there's just so
much that you can play with with regards to
the shape of the trunk. There any questions about that? No questions, but just some
really appreciative comments. Maybe I'll share with you. I appreciate you breaking
this down for me. It's giving me a solid
foundation to start my trees when normally I never
know where to start. So usually avoid drawing them. That's a common sentiment. Like sometimes it's
like we get nervous about how to start something. So it's great to get this. Breaking it down to these
various foundational parts. That's a good trick for weather. Whatever you're trying to draw is just tried to break it down into sections and don't try to tackle the
whole thing at once. Just try to tackle bit by
bit and then you can piece it all together once you're competent at each
individual thing. So it just makes
the whole process less scary when you can just kind of break it down
into bite-sized sections. Let's move on to roots. When I draw, I like to
keep it quite simple. I'll show you how I
commonly draw them. So I usually like to just do this kind of three
pointed star thing. But another thing you can do is you don't actually
have to draw the roots. You can just have the tree kind of coming out of the ground
with the ground kind of covering the
trunk because you don't always see the
roots coming out. It's usually only
where the earth is kinda been eroded
around the tree or maybe the tree is quite old and the roots have
grown up over time, especially in young trees, you don't tend to see
as much of the risks. But if you want to
make the roots quite a prominent feature that
can be quite nice, especially in old trees. So you can use, again, that wiggly styles of lines. So if you think about that kind of three-point star method, and we're just building
on that by blowing it up, adding some wiggly lines
instead of straight ones. And if you, depending
on how much detail you want to add or how much attention you
want to draw to the roots. You can also add some little shoots coming off the roots because
they kind of work in the same way as the branches with the kind of bigger
roots and then the smaller ones that grow off that in that kind
of fractal effect. Then we can also curve
the bottom of the tree and kinda show them starting
to grow up from the ground. But we don't have to
draw in much detail. Or we can draw some
kind of banana-shaped. And again, if you want to
add more than three roots, I quite like drawing three because it's, I think
it looks quite nice, but you can add as
many rows as you want depending on how you want your tree to look to
something that you can just play around with
and have fun with it, see what you can come up with.
5. Drawing Foliage: Now we are going to start our final piece where
we're going to be illustrating our series
of stylize trees. I'm going to start a
new canvas and I'm going to choose an
A4 canvas again. And I'm going to change my
brush to this mercury brush, which you can find in the
inking folder in Procreate. Just because we're going to be just going straight in
with drawing some shapes. We're not going to
be bothering with sketching for this piece. So what we're going to be doing is first of
all, drawing the foliage. So we're just going
to be drawing random shapes to create
the fourier edge. And then we're going to be
drawing our wooded area, the trunk and the
branches on top. And then we're going to
be going in with details. First of all, take a look
back at our tree shapes. I'm going to draw six
different trees for my piece, but you can draw more or less whatever you
feel up to today. I'm just going to get a bit
of inspiration from here. I think I'm going to draw
an open style of tree, maybe a pyramid,
fountain and weeping. And then I think I will go crazy for the other two
and see what I feel like. So let's go back to our canvas. Sarah, Is it okay if
they choose a shape that may not be on your
list? Yeah, Of course. Yeah, Yeah. Yeah. I would encourage you to
just draw what you feel like that she is just
for inspiration, just to show you some
starting points. But obviously, you can take
those as a starting point. So I'm going to use the open
style as a starting point, but I'm not going to do it in the same style as
was on the sheet. I'm going to do in my own way. But just taking the general
idea of in clusters, I'm going to just choose a random color and I
screen for foliage. And then we're just going
to start drawing shapes. Let's just draw any
shape that we want. Let's not think about
trees for a second. Let's just draw a blob. So what I'm gonna do
is just kind of let my hand flew over the page
and draw this weird blob. So I've drawn the outline of this shape and now I can just drop in that color to
fill that whole outline. And then what you can do is just go in and smooth
out the shape. But if you want, and you can
also use the eraser tool. So if I hold down
on the eraser tool and I'll be able to raise with the current brush and
then you can chip away at your shape. And I really have no idea what I want this
shape to look like, but I'm just chipping away until I like what it looks like. So it just kind of
let yourself be a bit free and don't worry about the final
outcome right now, just start drawing shapes and see what you
can come up with. And the weirder the shape, the more interesting
your tree will look. So just have fun with that. Quite like that shape that couldn't make an
interesting tree. And it doesn't
really match any of the common tree shapes
that I showed you. But that's fine. Because we want to just be able to do what
we want and go crazy. Let's try. I'm going to try drawing
a cluster of trees. Now. I'm just drawing
straight on this time. Instead of filling the shapes
because it's a bit quicker. I'm just drawing little blobs of various sizes and a kind
of general cluster. And then I can chip away with the eraser tool
quite like those shapes. And then I'm going to try
drawing a more pyramid shape. So I'm going to draw this
triangle just as my base. And then I'm going to just add a bit more interests to the
silhouette here by adding in some metal layers of branches
coming out to this side. Then I'm going to chip away
with the razor tool again. Kind of creating a nice
little layered effect at the bottom of the tree just to add more
interests there. You can see that I started
with that triangle, triangular shape
and just belt on it to create something
a bit more interesting. But equally, if you want to keep your shapes
really simple and just do really geometric shapes
that can also look quite cool. So play around with
that if you want. Let's try a fountain shape. So I'm just it kind of drawing little spiky bits
from 1 on the canvas. I'm making them can drip
down more at the top. The top they can go upwards
and then drip down. Just kind of editing
these shapes a bit to make the silhouette
look more interesting. And then let's try weeping. So here I'm just kind of
thinking about dribbling, dribbling paint or something. So I'm just drawing blocks. It's quite fun too. Play with shapes in this
way and think about your foliage as being one mass rather than lots
of individual leaves. Because that way we
can come up with much more interesting
silhouettes overall. Rather than if we started
with each individual leaf. And I think we'd be there
for a very long time. And it would be very painful. And don't worry if your shapes
are looking a bit weird. Just move on to the next one if you're getting
frustrated because we have a few a few more attempts
to the tree looking nice. If you mess up one or two,
don't worry about it. You can always get a
new sheet of paper. Yeah, exactly. An infinite number, number of paper on the beauty
of digital art. These are looking great. Thank you. Quite
pleased with these. And what we're gonna
do for the last one. I think another random shape,
maybe something a bit. Because I really like these
kind of smooth shapes. It's going to be a
bit asymmetrical. Let's just add another a
couple of blobs just for fun. Okay.
6. Drawing Trunks & Branches: Hopefully you have some blobs and shapes for your foliage. And now we can start a new layer and draw on the
trunk and the branches. So I'm going to just select
a darker color for the root. And I'm going to lower my
brush size a little bit. And I'm going to start
with the easier ones. So I'm just adding a tiny
bit of trunk to this tree. Again using the eraser tool to rubber anything that
is a bit messy. This palm tree just needs
a straight trunk as well. So you'll see that if you
look at trees and pine trees, they both generally have quite
long and straight trunk. Compared to the more
deciduous trees, which are more likely to have trunks and branches that
bend in weird ways. This one will have weight
straight trunk as well. And then we're going
to draw some of the branches Kindle
bending over. And we're going to keep
these quite simple. If you draw a line and
you don't like it, you can just tap
with two fingers to undo and then draw again
as many times as you like, which is quite handy because sometimes when you draw
a line It's not as smooth as you would quite
like this, this one. I'm not going to start the trunk in the
middle of the tree. I'm actually going to
have this one kind of leaning over to the side. Actually, I'm going to start
by drawing one main line up through the tree and
then we'll stick it out the branches after on this tree, I'm drawing the branches
in front of the foliage, which you see I
quite like to do in my work just as a
stylistic choice. But if you would prefer to have some of the
foliage covering the branches or a bit of books. Having some branches
can disappear and then come out from
behind the tree. And at various points. That's also something
that can look really good and it's quite
fun to play with as well. So you can have a
play around with lots of different ways of drawing the branches are
not doing the branches. We can remembering,
if you want that you can play with different styles of lines when you're
drawing your branches. I'm going to add a little group. They're just carve
out these roots. When I'm drawing the branches, I do like to keep it
quite simple and not overwhelm the tree with
too many branches. But while I'm building it up, I'll take a step back and
look at it again and see if there's any gaps that I could fill that
would look quite nice. We also have these little blobs I've drawn that will need
to attach some branches to, otherwise, they're just
going to be floating there. And you'll also want
your branches to line up with the
foliage so that it looks believable
that the branches are holding up these
bits of foliage. I'm actually going to just use the selection tool and move these two alphabets so that
I can draw in the trunk. I've got more space
to draw them in. So I'm going to make those
branches are bit more curly. Make this one kind of
curvy to match the kind of curving shapes that I have
drawn in that foliage shape. And then just thickening
out the trunk. Let's, let's draw some curve, curly, wavy root of this tree. So in this piece you can just play about with
different techniques on each tree and just
really use it to experiment and come up with
diverse looking trees. You can see with
this tree that I have drawn some branches
in front of the foliage, but some others behind
this foliage in front. And that just gives
more of an impression of some layering and
depth to this tree, which I think is
quite a nice effect. You can imagine that
these branches are going behind that tree. Then I'll just draw in a few more branches just
too balanced each side. Yeah, I'm pretty
happy with these. We've got quite a diverse range of different types of trees. And you can see that I
took some inspiration from those commentary shapes that I showed you
at the beginning, but I also can build upon
that and did my own thing. And so, yeah, hopefully you have done the same
and have come up with some interesting shapes.
7. Finishing Touches: What I'm going to do now is
just select both layers. Just by swiping right on
one of my other layers. And I'm going to use the selection tool to just
even out the whole piece. Just to space
everything out nicely. And before we add details
and finish the piece. So what I'm going to do
now is add new layer. I'm going to choose
a color that's a bit darker than my foliage color. Then what we're
gonna do is just add in some really simple details just to give our piece a bit more interest
and texture in, but we're not going to spend
too long on these details. They don't have to
be anything crazy. Like I'm just putting
in some dots. Just gives the piece a little bit more
interests while keeping that simplified,
stylized look. And then on the sweeping
tree I'm going to add some veins, shapes
dripping down. Very simplified and just
randomly placed just to give the impression of what these
leaf shapes might look like. But we're not, we're not going to put in
too many details. And we can even
add little lines, Sarah, Sarah strategy here. So these details
can sit either on the full foiling or float
off them a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's quite nice. If you can get a balance between and having some of these shapes can have overlapping the
original silhouette. And I don't tend to have too
many like floating outside. But I quite like
when they overlap because I think it just gives the overall silhouette
of the shape. If you think of it in
terms of just the outline, it just gives it that
tiny bit more interest when you're looking at it. But if you want to keep
it within the shape, that's totally fine too. Like I have these two trees
here and I also quite like, like it when it overlaps the boundaries because
it gives a bit more interests and kind of
imperfection to your trees, which I think is really nice if you can show a few imperfections
within your drawing. Because it just makes it seem a bit more handmade and gives it more personal
touch. My opinion. Sometimes also like to draw some little flower shapes and allowed in some little dots. Again as well. Because we love dots. I want to echo a comment from Gabrielle in the
chat who writes. Those details are so simple
and yet adds so much. I never would have
thought to do this. They really do a lot. Yeah, to the syllabus, just such a simple technique. That's basically it
for the details. And one last thing, we want to add some details
in the bark as well. So I'm going to add a new
layer and I'm going to create a clipping mask above my layer. So I'm just going to
tap on the left of that new layer and
select clipping mask. And you can see there's
an arrow that's come up above the hidden layer. That just means that
everything that we draw on the new clipping mask layer will be visible only
within the boundaries of the pixels that
we've drawn below. I've just selected a new color. And I'm just going
to draw some lines. With that. Those trees just gives a
little bit more texture. Again, very simple, just
really simple lines. And you can make these
vertical or horizontal, or you can add in
little circular shapes. Just whatever you feel like. Just adds a little bit
more interest and makes the tree more quirky
and interesting. So, yeah, you can play around
with those styles as well. Palm trees are really like
this kind of zigzaggy shape. And then I really like these flowing kind of contour
shapes or lines even. Yeah, that's also a very
simple technique that adds so much to your drawings, although I think that color
is a little bit strong, so I'm just going to
lower the opacity tiny bit, but halfway. And then one last thing we can do to kind of tie
everything together. Let's just draw some little
dots around the whole piece. And I'll give you a kind of
cohesive series if you want. Yeah, and then if after
this lesson you want to go and play around with
textures and clipping masks, then that could be fun as well. And we're not gonna
go into that today, but it's also something that
is fun to play around with. And if you want to
change your colors, if you want your trees
to be different colors, we can create a new
layer and above the foliage shapes and turn that into a
clipping mask again. And then I can choose
a different color and just color my trees
in different color. That's maybe a little bit dark. So go to hue saturation and
brightness and lighten that. One last thing that we can do
is go to the details layer. Click on that. And you can always
play around with the blending modes here, which can be quite fun. I like to use the multiply and then lower the
opacity a little bit. And that just adds a tiny
bit more interest again, but it's a really
simple technique. You can see that the
color changes depending on whether it's over a
shape or another color. So yeah, that's basically it. I have my finished piece
and hopefully you have also come up with
really nice series of unique trees and learned
some useful tools that you can use to kinda do this again and make another set of completely different trees to the ones that you made today.
8. Final Thoughts: So hopefully in
this short session, you've realized that it's not actually that scary
to draw a tree. And as long as you include the basic requirements
of the tree, such as the trunk and
branches and foliage. Then you can be
really playful with your shapes and practice stylizing your tree
drawings to come up with some really unique designs. The other takeaway that
you've hopefully gained is that there's never just
one way to do something. And you should experiment
and play around until we find a way that works for you
and that you enjoy. And everything that
I've taught you in this class is really just one style and
one way of working. But I would encourage you to
keep experimenting and keep playing and having fun with your drawings and don't be too scared to make bad drawings. And just give yourself
permission to view beginner and make mistakes and
let loose and have fun.
Sarah Holliday, Illustrator
