 Hello there and welcome to my neighborhood. I'm Sandy Olnok and this is a tree, I guess five or six blocks away from my house. And I thought I would show you some of the trees in my neighborhood as well as some trees in a park near me and talk through the things that are making your trees look unrealistic if you sketch trees that don't look great. And some of the ones that I see, I just wanna debunk them. That's not the way to draw a tree. We wanna draw something that's gonna feel a little looser, a little more natural. We're gonna talk to a small sketch, a bigger sketch, so we can get more detail into a bigger one. And then we're gonna talk about alcohol markers and watercolors and how you can apply those same things in those mediums. All right, I'm always gonna recommend that you start with a pencil and learn how to do it with a pencil first before you move to a medium, but we'll go through all of it, okay? So I've mentioned before that a bunch of us are going through the 30 days to more confident sketching class that I have on my site and a lot of people got stuck on trees. I tried providing a bunch of extra help and it wasn't enough, so I'm here doing more this week. It's gonna be tree week in my life. And these trees in this park have like very open branches on either side of them. That one tree in the middle is very dense. And then when you look at them from certain angles, you'll see more denseness because all of the branches are layering on top of each other. When you draw in person, you can walk up to the tree and walk around it and see that these branches are covering the tree trunk. So somewhere the tree trunk just disappears. The branches themselves aren't seen because all you see is the pine needle clusters. There's some trees that are very dense. So this is the one we saw a minute ago and it has a lot more closeness to the tree truncle. Very little in terms of open areas and different shapes for the branches. This little poor Charlie Brown tree, poor little guy. He has a lot of different types of openings in the tree, like different places where branches haven't filled in and different types of shapes as well. Now look at the highlights on those branches are where the sun is hitting, such as it is. It's a cloudy day, but the parts that are dark are not the bottoms of those branches. The parts that are dark are the branches way underneath the ones that are sticking out from inside the tree trunk. It's not like just draw a branch and put a shadow on the bottom of it because sometimes that branch itself is all light because it's just a light branch out in the sunshine. So what we're drawing when we draw the shadows is the branches that are behind the branches that are in the front. We'll talk about that more as we do some drawing. This little guy, again, different type of tree or at least different type of pruning because the branches go all the way to the ground and then the shapes are all kitty wampus as well. These are not tree farm trees. They're not triangle shaped. They're generally triangle shaped. They are bigger at the bottom than the top but there's branches that stick out in the left and right and everything. This one is in my neighborhood and I was filming from one direction and I didn't see much detail because I was filming with the sun on the other side of the tree. Then I walked around and saw the other side of the tree and I can now see the visual difference between the lights and shadows much easier. So walk around the tree and look for a better view of it when you want to draw it and then look for the character of those branches. This one has all kinds of little parts that stick out in different directions which is kind of cool and interesting and it has different amounts of shadow based on how dense those branches are and what angle you're looking at it. This one is a ginormous tree that's right down the road from me and has a whole different character to the branches themselves. It almost looks like popcorn. The way that the lights of each of the groups of needles hang onto the branches but the shape of the whole tree is just crazy. It's like a really fun tree and it's going to have a whole different feel to it and a different style when you draw it. So drawing from real life trees is gonna make a huge difference. A lot of people start out the way we do when we're in grade school and the teacher says draw a tree and you draw a tree trunk and you draw some branches coming off the tree trunk and you put some leaves or pine needles on them. That is just where our brains automatically go. And I understand that urge but I just wanna say don't do that. This is a Charlie Brown tree. Now I love Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown's Christmas cartoons are some of my very favorites but that is not going to give you a realistic tree. It's giving you a weirdly shaped flat tree because there's no branches coming toward you. Remember when I walked around and we saw branches pointing toward us that just came entirely in front of that tree trunk. There's nothing of that in that kind of a tree. So I have told people before, just draw some squiggly scallop-ish shapes and this is what I see a lot of and I realize people are listening to my words and drawing what my words say, not what my demonstration was because this is what I'm seeing a lot of all over the web and I've seen it from tons of people who've taken this class. This is nothing on those who are doing it right now because this is how people interpret what I say. So I have not been clear because I consider these to be almost like stuffed animals' legs. If you think about a stuffed animal, it's kind of scallopy, kind of poofy and has a shadow on one side of it and we're in our brains. If you've done some art, you're used to like, okay, the shadow would be on the bottom and we draw trees like that. No, no, no, no, that is not what a tree looks like. Now, I suppose maybe there is a tree that has itself made up of stuffed animal legs. I don't really know, but I'm going to sketch one here for you, a small one and then we'll do a big one, starting with a triangle shape just to get the general triangle gist, but then I'm using very light pressure. I'm holding the pencil back a little further and I change the pressure of the pencil as I start making these kind of squiggly lines that go in and out. Sometimes they're rounded, sometimes they're kind of pointy, different sorts of shapes, and I call this calligraphy. Your calligraphy will be different than anybody else's because it's yours, just like your handwriting is. And for me, holding back further on the pencil instead of cramping down on the tip as well as varying the pressure makes a huge difference. Now, in any landscape, some of the darkest things you will typically see, especially if you're looking at pines is going to be the trees. So they're not really going to have white highlights on them. You can sketch them in when you're doing loose sketches like this. Totally having lighter highlights is fine, but a lot of times your tree is going to be nearly black because it's really dark, it's really dense and you're just putting shadows within shadows, but we won't really get into that a whole lot right now. So I started putting in some shadows just with light pressure on the pencil. So I get a mid-tone and then start using heavier pressure and start breaking up some of those sections that might have started feeling like stuffed animal legs, break them up, kind of crisscross something over top of them, add in a little darks here and there, and then if you're happy with your tree, then you can add in just a tiny bit of tree trunk, but don't make your tree trunk significantly darker and heavier and thicker than the rest of the tree because then everybody's gonna just look at the tree trunk. They're not looking at the tree. So let's try this with a large tree and instead of just drawing a triangle, I started by drawing a tree that has some branches, groups of branches hanging out to the left, some swing out to the right, that sort of thing. And then I'm holding the pencil back far away from the pencil tip and then drawing one of the branches. And when I'm drawing a tree and I wanna kinda get the flavor of that tree, I'll look for a section of branches and I'll just focus my eye on that. I'll keep going back to it, come back to my paper, go back to that branch. I'm not really worried about making this exact shape necessarily. I'm looking for something that's gonna give me an idea, okay, I wanna make one branch that goes across the whole thing and has a swoop to it because I see one branch that has a really interesting swoop. And then another branch that has a little bit hanging down from it. That's really what I'm looking for. And then I'll go in and add some overall grayness to the whole area of the pine needles. You can do this just with the pencil, you can get a blending stump, you can do all different kinds of things to spread that grayness around. And then start adding in your shadows. You're still looking at one section of the tree that you're looking at. And consider doing at least three, if not five or more values of gray. And value is from thinking of five as your really darkest and one as your very lightest and then a range of grays in between. Now I'm working my way up the tree looking at a different section of branches, doing the same thing, making a few branches that look like something that I see in the tree. And then sketching some of the gray color in and then adding in shadows and refinement of the branches. And you can get really super detailed with this and make a super tight refined drawing. I'm gonna do one for Instagram later on this week. So keep an eye out for that. Using the same techniques that I'm using but really just putting a lot more into it than what I'm doing here. But I like to practice my drawing and my calligraphy in doing sketches like this because it's gonna help me when I start moving to another medium. If I wanna use markers or paints or something, if I can at least achieve this kind of looseness in my sketch, then maybe I can translate some of that into when I start working in a medium. I'm gonna do something a little different on this tree. I'm gonna use a blending stump and you can use a Q-tip, you can use your finger, you can use a pastel blender, makeup sponges, all different kinds of things to move the pigment around on the paper and just kind of pulling those sections together so that I don't have as many white whites because the only white that'll show in this tree, I want to be the air holes where the birds fly through, the place where the sky is, everywhere the tree is, I wanna have some kind of gray value. But now when I did that, I moved all the darks that I had in there already. Those got moved around by the blending stump, so I'm gonna go in and add in some really nice dark blacks using heavier pressure. And the pressure when you're using a 9B pencil like this will give you a really nice, rich, dark color. And I'm looking to get that value range in the tree because that's what's gonna really help to make it look right. When I come to the open areas at the top, I can start adding in just a couple little branches to indicate that there's something a little lacy are going on there. It's not all going to be pine needles and just creating a few more shadows throughout the whole drawing so it starts to feel more realistic. What you wanna do is squint at your tree that you're looking at for your reference and squint at your drawing and see if you've got the right amount of really darks in there. If I squint at this right now, I can see some areas where there isn't any really dark and decide if I want some more darks in there or do I need more darks at the bottom of the tree? Usually those branches that hang out from underneath end up being nice and dark. And then there might be some sections when you squint at it that you'll say, there's a whole bunch of branches that seem to end at one spot. They all end in the same area and they don't look like natural branches that have a little lacy fingers coming off of them, of the pine needles. So you'll be able to see that when you squint. Squinting just kind of evens everything out so you really just see the stuff that stands out and the shape and the value are usually what stand out. And you can get into gobs of detail. As I said, I'm gonna be putting a full on crazy detailed drawing of a pine tree on my social this week and maybe I'll add it onto the Saturday post so that those of you who don't follow me on social will get a chance to see it. So there's a difference between the more detailed tree still has lots of loose, casual kind of scribbliness to it but it has value, it has form. Whereas these other trees don't really have that. They just, they're very graphical which can be a look and that's not to say that people who paint that way or draw that way that it's bad but if you're looking for realism then you need to look at what's in front of you and create something that has that same kind of a feel to it. So now let's look at a couple of mediums and I'll take some alcohol markers. I'm just gonna take three colors and then do some pen work on this and gonna use a light green to start with just to do those loose shapes in the same way that I did the very lightest grays but I'm not gonna do the outlines first because if I start trying to draw a tree outline with a pen I am most likely to end up with a whole lot of lines around the tree and I don't want that, I want it to feel very loose the same way as my pencil sketch did. So I'm using a mid-tone for a green and starting to add in those kind of same shadow shapes that I put into the bigger tree that I already sketched and when I sketch just before doing a color piece like this it's almost like my hand remembers from the sketch to the finished like little marker drawing like my hand just goes, oh, I remember how to make this line I'm just gonna scribble this whereas if you don't practice first then your hand doesn't remember it. So next I'm gonna add in some other details and this is with a darker green marker and there's a lot of people that look at my trees that I've drawn in markers and try to make it all polka dots. Notice that the small lines, these small marks that are indicating some of the detail don't come out until I've already got the lighter color underneath that's joined and connected with the mid-tones and then I can start adding in some of these dots I see people who do like well it's almost impressionistic trees because they're trying to just put little marker dots on the page and you need all those colors to join together in some way but here's where I'm gonna use just a regular old Sharpie to add some lines to this in the same way that you might do with watercolor and wash it with the pen and ink and I'm just gonna do the same thing I did with the pencil outlines except here I can't lighten and darken the pressure of the line the line doesn't get thicker and thinner but it can stop. So since my hand was used to making that kind of scribbly broken line I'm making that same kind of line here except I'm lifting the pen all the way off the paper when I get to that edge that I want to lighten so that I'm not getting a solid outline all the way around the tree because that is something that we have to resist when we're trying to make realism because an outline all the way around the tree doesn't exist in real life and something like this is gonna give it the flavor of that real tree. Now when you've got pen and ink you can also add some other sketchy elements to it here I'm adding just some darker shadows by creating some shadow lines to do that so lots of different techniques you can incorporate based on what kind of style you're trying for in the sketch that you're creating and then I'll just finish off the tree up at the top just putting a couple sections of the tree trunk in there not making them stand out more I want the tree itself and the branches and the shadows in the tree to stand out much more than I do the tree trunk tree trunk should not be the thing that draws your eye straight to it. So with watercolor and I'm gonna do this just with watercolor and not add the pen and ink to it so you can see how you might incorporate that even if you're not gonna do a pen and ink wash or pen and ink on top of the wash so I'm gonna do some very light watercolor very wet pigment and then drop in some middle mixture so a little thicker green to drop into that and that's gonna start creating those multiple tones remember we wanna have a couple of values in the tree not just like not just one well I mean I guess with some trees when you're just going to have a shape of a tree in the background you might want it to be mostly one color if it's almost a silhouetti type of shape but we're gonna just go for a couple of different colors here, different values I've mixed up some much thicker pigment this time this is all one color so just thicker pigment and I'm using my number four brush to just add in those same kind of little little details in the dark that I did before and they're not polka dots we're not trying to polka dot the thing to death but some of them being polka dots are going to I guess contribute to the laciness and others are meant to kind of be a line of dots so they start making a branch or something that feels like a branch and depending on what kind of tree you're painting you might need more or less of that but this is just one way to do it without adding dependent ink to it as well and when I got to the end I realized there was just not enough connection between some of these and I just had wanted more density to it so I just added a few brush strokes to kind of melt it all together so when you're doing your pencil sketches and I know some of you are gonna be like I don't wanna do pencil sketches first practice not doing that and start working on your calligraphy because your calligraphy is your signature style and even if you don't draw if you're like well I just color I just put a tree in my scene it still has your calligraphy to it and practicing that is gonna make a big difference and if you can practice that in pencil and start getting used to those value changes then when you get to adding it into color you're gonna have a whole lot of different tools in your tool belt if you are one of my students who has emailed me and said you know I can do cabins I can do mountains I can do skies but I can't do trees to save my life and they ruin every art piece I make then I just recommend spending a whole week practicing just trees just trees trees trees trees trees trees fill like entire pages full of trees and practice them in pencil and then move to your medium and if you can do them outside all the better looking at them in real life you're gonna see more value difference between the darks and the not as darks and then as you get to the mediums you can see more of that range when you're in in person photos flatten everything out and if you just are afraid to sketch outside I know some people are I promise you people will be nice then go to a park and take not just still photos because as I said those flatten things out but take some video footage too walk around the tree so you can kind of see underneath of those branches and you can know where is the deepest darkest shadow and then what's the next darkest and like how many levels can you see in the tree because if you can see when you've got a shadow within a shadow your trees are just gonna get more and more realistic and being able to do that from life is very very important as you're growing as an artist as you are learning to draw the shapes that you see as the shapes make all the difference just remember you're not putting shadows underneath those branches look how light they are the darks that you see underneath of them are not the shadow of the branch they're the shadow below the branch now next time I was gonna do deciduous trees which are the ones that lose their leaves in the fall we don't really have anything blooming it's February but we do have bushes so I have been running around gathering footage of bushes so we can talk about how to make one bush look different from another bush because they're not always the same species so we wanna be able to make the leaves and the branches and everything look different from one type of plant to another so I will be talking about that in my next video and in the meantime, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss out hit that little bell because the bell is what's gonna send you the reminder if you have your YouTube reminders on that there's a video coming so be sure to check that out follow me on socials and all that good stuff I'll put links in the doobly-doo to the blog if you want photos or to see more of my sketches of trees and that's about it I'll see you later, bye-bye