Tip: Painting Realistic Trees

“Whatever the color of the tree you are painting, keep the leaves grouped as a mass. Paint the big overall mass of the tree first, then look for any important angles or features. Branches get lighter and cooler as they get smaller, and light from the sky diffracts around the edges. Branches coming toward you will be darker than those going away from you because you are looking underneath the shadow side. Pay careful attention to the scales of your trees; keep them the right size for the plane they are in.”

From Tim Deibler in "Capturing the Seasons in Oils"


This work entitled "Poplar" by Ambera Wellmann is a good example of this approach to painting trees. Notice that the trees in the foreground are built from irregular shapes. The leaves appear as a mass of color, but the colors become lighter where the foliage is thinner near the edges. The colors are darker in the middle and toward the bottom where shaded.

The trees in the distance appear smaller than those in the foreground. The trees that make-up the background planes are almost indistinguishable from each other. By using dull cool colors and little or no details, the artist has made the distant trees blend together into a single mass of their own. By contrast, the trees closest to the viewer have more details and are painted using more intense colors. Yet they both convey a sense of realism to the viewer.

Look more closely at the variations in color and detail between the different banks of trees. Even in the nearest trees the artist did not paint individual leaves. She also limited the number of visible branches she included. This rendering gives the eye more than enough information to recognize the object as nearby trees. Adding too many details would have make them appear less realistic than they would otherwise.