 Hi there, it's Sandy Olnok and today I'm going to do a deep dive on tree bark because I've realized no matter how many trees I've showed you how to draw, I haven't been real clear about the bark itself. So let's do it. So let's look at some kind of typical bark that I normally have taught people how to do, which is put down a base color and then start putting in some texture with a dark pen and then I tell you just go over that real quickly with a medium and yes that's generally true, but let's look at this in specific and just one block of a piece of bark I think might be more instructive than all of my videos with showing you how to do a tree. I'm starting with one of the really dark colors to make the darkest side so the light is going to be coming from the right I want to put some shadow in the left and what I'm doing is letting my pen press down to make thicker lines and lift up to make thinner lines, but they're all joined lines they're all connected to each other and it's creating that overall texture. Next going to a slightly lighter brown and these aren't all that far off in color they look relatively near each other, but here's an example of what I see a lot on a lot of folks and they're like why doesn't my tree look like yours it's because your little marks aren't joined I know that my pen dances across the surface it goes up and down and people think that that means I'm making dotted marks I find the same thing with tree leaves is that people make something that looks a little bit more like polka dots than it does like leaves because you're looking at the overall motion of my pen and when I do these videos when I'm trying to draw everything all at once I know it's really hard to focus on exactly what I'm doing so hopefully this kind of a slowdown is going to help. So now taking one of the mid tone markers and adding some shadows going over the color that I put on the left to add some darkness to it and choose the next lighter brown that I had used and start to build the color overall I'm going over top of the texture that I've drawn so that I don't end up with a lot of scrubly lines. Now let's take a really tight close up of tree bark and this is from a different photograph that I was playing with to look at the tree bark what happens with trees is the outer layer of bark peels away from the tree itself and you get these crevices in between think about tectonic plates of the earth you get continents that float to the surface that's what is happening kind of to a tree the inner part is generally darker usually and the plates that lift up all those pieces of bark are raised off the surface so all the parts that you're drawing these scrubly lines in between that's all the inside of the tree and you're creating those shapes on the outside and I keep mine really rough I don't try to be real specific about it unless I'm doing a giant drawing the bigger you're doing it the more specific you can be but here I'm adding a warm gray to start individually shading each one of those pieces of bark across the whole picture then I need to start creating that dimension I've done that a little bit with having some dark lines on the left hand side and then they got progressively lighter so now I'm to take those progressively lighter grays and start to shade the tree the same way as I did with the last one and bringing those colors across so I get that overall shading but now I need to start making sure that all of those pieces of bark look like they're raised they need to look like they're up off the surface of that tree so on the left side and bottom of those shapes I'm just putting a very thin line and it's a broken line not worried about outlining every single piece necessarily but it's making each one of them look like individual plates on that surface of the tree just you know doodling those little lines in there makes a huge difference in creating that realism but now I want to really get into some darks I want to make this look even more realistic so I'm taking another gray and starting to individually deal with each one of those plates so that I have the shadows on the left hand side and then I'll take a lighter gray and continue that across the whole tree so I'm getting that roundness but doing so by looking at each of those as individual plates now as I looked at the top piece of bark I realized I could put some darks in there you can work on these forever let me tell you I'm using some dark grays in here on that brown you can use grays and browns together and if you end up with anything that looks weird just go over it a little bit with your brown markers again and here I'm adding some texture onto the gray one and when you look at it close up with your nose right to the paper it's gonna look like a mess but look at your work from a foot or two away and that's gonna give you a more realistic picture of whether that looks like what you're trying to create or not and now for something a little bit different but related birch trees birch trees have a white bark on the outside and dark on the inside or I guess sometimes it's a reddish on the inside but we're just gonna go for darkish for the moment and I'm gonna make some tall thin that if you haven't seen birch trees they're tall thin white trees and they're not always straight remember that when you start to make any kind of element in nature that not everything is going to be perfectly straight lined up evenly spaced because mother nature doesn't do things that way so I'm starting by using some grays to establish the overall roundness of the shapes and I decided to put a dark shadow on one side so that it will define the shapes of these two trees and then going in to add the texture birch trees have horizontal texture on them they don't have a lot of vertical they have a little bit here in there sometimes but the bark peels off in horizontal pieces instead of in those plates like I was talking about in the last one so I started with a darker color but then moved quickly to a lighter one so I can add more of those striations around the tree those are texture rather than depth the darker lines are going to be depth but I was looking at a tree itself and looking at where the lines are how thin are they how light are they and trying to see if I could figure out how to match that in doing my drawing of it and it's a skill that you really can't overestimate how much it helps is being able to start to look at things and assess it not as oh my gosh I see a tree and I can't draw tree but look at it as what color is right there what is that texture look like so the trees that I was looking at had a little hint of brown in them sometimes birch trees will have a little purple little blue look for what colors you see and add just a slight bit of that and then I added a lighter version of that same color in order to make the the bark just soften up a little bit and then went in using my chisel nib I have some dry chisel nibs that make thinner lines so for some of these lines I'm using a chisel because that's going to give me a better effect rather than trying to use that big super brush nib I was feeling like I had added too much of the tan color so I went back in with another gray which also gave me more depth and again gonna switch to a lighter gray to just go over those edges and break those up just a little bit now it's time to talk about context for your tree bark because your tree bark is going to change based on what's around it because a background behind any object is going to change the colors that are in it and it's going to change the intensity with which you need to render them if you're talking about something that's against a light sky it might be very different than in a dark forest and you need to know what that context is in order to finish the drawing itself so I started by layering just a brown color so I could sketch in the tree trunk itself and some of the roots that are going out and went over it with a gray just to pull it back into a more neutral natural looking color because that yellowish brown was looking kind of garish and I'm going to do the same thing you've already seen me do you know the one on the bottom left where I was drawing the plates that's what the texture looks like small and when you're trying to create a realistic bark texture you need to know what that tree is going to look like from the distance that you're drawing it how much of that detail can be seen from the distance you are away sometimes you're just going to see what's in the upper left you're just going to see striations of color and that's it you're not going to see individual plates and here I thought let me see if I could draw those little teeny teeny teeny tiny pieces of bark and would that work at this distance and I'm doing it all against white knowing that I'm going to need to do something to this in order to make it work in a context but I thought I'd just proceed right now so you can see the difference between when you're just working on a white surface versus trying to actually put it into context with the scene around it I'm using the same technique of going with progressively lighter colors toward the right hand side where the light is keeping the light consistent on all of these and having the darker colors on the left and that's going to at least establish the basis of the tree itself so now I thought I'd throw in some background and just going to make it a generic dirt background like this is in a forest of some kind with lots of really dark dirt around it so that we can see how something changes when there's dark color around it because it can look really weird if you don't take that into context so I've got nice dark rich colors in there not worried about making it all perfect this is just a sketch but now I'm going to start darkening the tree first I wanted to bring it into feeling more like a brown tree even though I used all those grays I can still change that color and still go over it I'm using the side of the marker and making very light strokes so that if I decide I didn't like that color I want a different tone to it I can go in with another and do the same thing and here I'm using a darker one because I liked the fact that this is getting deeper and darker and it's starting to feel like it's part of the picture instead of being slapped on the top of it and as I started getting into it I got more and more rich and dark colors as I was just kind of skipping the marker over the surface but making sure that I'm not making dotted marks and just letting the marker slide across the surface I'm putting layers and layers to build up the color eventually all that texture that I put in the first place may disappear I may have to put more of that in especially if you use a lot of strokes you do a lot of scrubbing back and forth I'm trying to use really light strokes across the surface so I don't destroy all that initial work but you know depending on how much practice you've got at doing this you may find that a little challenging to get used to so the tree felt very much like it was part of this now so I could put in a background and since just recently I did a whole series on bokeh I thought it'd be fun to do a bokeh background behind the tree using the same techniques that I taught in that video you can just scroll back a couple on my channel from this one and I'll also put a link to it in the doobly-doo and I went over that color with medium tones so that those bokeh dots could be in the background and then added more so I have some in the foreground and some in the background and it creates some depth in behind that tree but the tree is nice and rich and dark and it has a really strong dark side and it has a nice strong highlight so it looks very natural in this context whereas when I first started and it was just all those light colors against white it didn't look realistic so what really makes things work is how the tree works with the entire scene not necessarily just the tree itself okay I hope this was helpful instead of trying to do a tree and a fox and a cloud and grasses and everything all in one video just focusing in on one element like the bark of the tree might help you to make better trees yourself in Friday's video I'll also be drawing wood but in much more whimsical context so if realism is not your jam you might really be excited about Friday's video because I am excited to share it with you on social media all week long I'll be addressing different types of projects with wood and bark in other mediums as well because we can't always use our Copic markers right all right I will see you again on Friday right here on YouTube all week long on Instagram etc and I hope that you have a great week smash that like button before you hit the road bye