 Hello there, it's Sandy Olnock on Earth Day here to talk about drawing realistic pine trees. And though the demonstration is going to be in fountain pen, the lessons apply to all mediums. So stick around. The first thing I want to do is do a review of some Hanamouless sketchbooks after this one. The She's End Designs. This one is just, it's going to make you happy and just can tell you that now. It's a soft cover, faux leather kind of cover, little journal. And the first page is black, so I did a white doodle. And then switched my fountain pen to start testing and see. It works really nicely, the writing is really smooth with your pen, but it does bleed through if you get real heavy with it. But look at the rainbow, isn't that nice? You can also get them in solid colors, but the rainbow is just so sweet. So that's an extra, that's not part of this review. But I want to talk about these Hanamoula papers. I've loved their lettering paper to do drawing on because it takes the pen really well. It doesn't feather at all. The writing drawing experience is so nice that the pen just glides across the surface. It's really great. But the paper all falls out. So if you want something that's a sketchbook like I do, I compared the cappuccino and the gray, which are on 55 pound and the nostalgia, which is on 90 pound so that I could kind of test and see how they react. And what I found was that the 55 pound does not like washes. If you're somebody who likes washes with your pen and ink work, these are probably not the sketchbooks for you. But if you like doing work on gray or tan paper, just know that those are options. They come in different sizes too. This nostalgia is a little heavier paper. It's an off-white, slightly off-white, and it is 90 pound. So it does handle the washes quite nicely. I wouldn't call it watercolor paper. I wouldn't get this to do watercolor sketches with. But if you like to do washes with your ink work, this is an excellent, excellent paper. It has that property of the ink just going smoothly over the surface, but it also can take some washes. And it also handled this Higgins pen, which I got recently and somebody on Instagram wanted to know what I think. I don't like it. You can see that it doesn't get black black. And on this sketchbook, it doesn't go through at all. It did on the 55 pound ones. So there's that. And you'll see a little bit of that in the next sketchbook. And this is a little seashell that I picked up on a beach at one time. I don't normally find giant shells like that, so I decided to draw it in my sketchbook. So this is another of the 55 pound ones, the gray book. And I got the bigger one in this one. And this guy did fairly well. Once I got really heavy with the ink, you could see it has a little warbling in it. But I drew right over top of it and it didn't really bother anything. Regular pen and ink doesn't go through. But I use this stupid Higgins pen for this page, a lot of the black in it. And the fact that it doesn't get really black bothers me because Higgins makes inks and they know from black. So I don't know what the deal is, but there you go. When you use a whole lot of that pen, it does weird things. So there's a couple of different tree sketches as you've seen in the video so far. I've been kind of on a tree kick and doing all different kinds of pine trees, but also other trees as well. This is a little place that I visited to do some sketching with some friends. But let's get to those pine trees. And first I want to talk about what not to do and what to do and then show you an example. First, what I see a lot of people do, and I teach a lot of classes and I have a lot of students post their pictures of their trees and they say, oh, my trees look so terrible. Why is that? And this is what I think goes through people's heads. And they just start putting branches on either side of the trunk of the tree. And sometimes they're even and sometimes they're not. Sometimes they go different directions. Sometimes they go up or down. Which is fine because trees do all different kinds of things, but this is a two-dimensional tree. Do not do a two-dimensional tree. It will never look realistic because your branches are all going out left to right as if you put your arms out to your sides. And that's not the way trees are. They are three-dimensional objects. You've probably tried to put together or seen people try to put together a tree that is like a Christmas tree and you put the branches all different directions, picture looking at it from the top. That's what we want to start to figure out. Now some pine trees may have their branches, even some don't. They have them kitty wampus. That's perfectly fine. But there are branches that come forward and backwards from that same trunk. And they intersect with all these other branches. They just crisscross them in all different kinds of kitty wampus ways. Now I'm just doing a quick structure of it here, but you can kind of get the idea where all these branches are going and they're not going to do it evenly in one direction or another. They're not left to right only. So if you look at the first tree that I drew, it's as if the trunk was in the middle and all the branches went out opposite each other. In this version of it, we want the branches to go out all different directions because that's what's going to make it look three dimensional. So whether you do this in a fountain pen or you're doing this in Copic markers or colored pencils or anything, you want to have a tree that looks like it's got branches coming all different directions. So in a fountain pen type of usage for this, we will start with a tree trunk. And I don't make mine just one big fat line usually because there are branches that intersect with that tree trunk. They're going to break that up in different ways. So I kind of make a dotted line just so I don't end up stuck with one big hunk and line down the middle of my tree. Now I may do that in some videos sometimes, but when I'm doing something like this, I try to be a little more careful with it. But what I'm doing is building different groups of branches off of that center trunk. And some of them are going to go to the left and right, but then some of them are going to go down at an angle. This is one of those, there's all different kinds of pine trees and fir trees and I'm not getting into species of trees here, but there are some where the branches all hang downward. And then there's others where the branches start to lean upward toward the sun. So you have to know which one you're looking at. And if you go and download a pine tree from the web and start to try to replicate exactly where those branches are, look to see if you can zoom in and tell what direction it's going. Is it in front of the other branches or behind? And of course, if you're doing something where you're using color, you may try to indicate some of that forward and back with lighting. But in this particular case, I'm just trying to get the shape of the tree. But notice how it's not all the same. I don't have all of the same distance between all of the branches. The branches are all different lengths, they're different widths apart from each other. And as I work, I'm constantly looking back at the tree to see, okay, does this feel natural? Does it feel right? And if you're looking at a tree and trying to replicate that tree, you'll be able to see the differences in what you're drawing. But sometimes you'll need to go backwards and fix some of the gaps or create some gaps. One of my friends who's a painter always talks about leaving air holes for the birds to fly through, leaving little windows for them to go in and out of the tree because it's not a solid mass. You don't want solid in the middle. But you also want it to be nicely uneven because uneven is the way Mother Nature makes things. She doesn't make trees that are all the same in every single direction. They're always going to be symmetrical to each other and all the branches are going to go out to the same left and right distance from the trunk. They're going to be all different kinds of ways. And you need to make your tree feel the same. Make your tree just kiddy wampus, which is really easy to do. When you think about, okay, I don't know how to draw a tree, that means any crazy branch you draw is probably going to be okay as long as you try to make it look like it is dimensional, like three dimensional, not just two. So I'm looking over the tree now to see where I have some weird places that are too even. And I'm going to clump up some of the little clusters of branches and kind of just looking at different things. Look at the bottom of that tree. It's got one side hanging down further than the other, and that's the way trees are. If you actually look at a tree, they don't all end at the same place. They'll have a dead branch hanging out in one section. Or there are some trees where you just have a whole chunk of the tree that fell off. It got blown in the wind and doesn't have any branches for a few feet. So that's going to make your trees look more natural. And of course, when you're just drawing one tree and you want it to be perfect, that's different. But generally, you're drawing trees in a setting. And you'll have some trees that are next to each other in different states of repair. So it'd be some trees that might have a chunk missing and some that wouldn't. So I talked about some of the trees have branches that hang down and some that lean upward. And this one has its branches reaching toward the sun instead of away from it. So same deal, though. They're not going to be doing it at the same width, the same distance apart from each other. They're not going to be the same width left to right because trees just do not grow that way. It's just not what they do. I wish they did because it would make it a whole lot easier to draw them in some ways because then we could measure things and make them all perfect. But that's not the way things go. There are sometimes when you'll see there's going to be enough openings like down in the bottom section there, I have openings where you can actually see the branches. So really study some trees. Just go out for a walk sometime and just look, look at the trees, look at how many openings there are. And what do they look like? Where do branches crisscross them? And you'll be able to make your trees more natural once you start to study what a tree actually looks like. So this little picture is a handout on my website. So if you want to download that and fold it up and stick it in your sketchbook so that you remember to make your trees look three dimensional, then you can go grab that. And there's also links to the sketchbooks if you're interested in any of those that are all in the Doobly-Doo as well as over on the blog. So that's it for me. Happy Earth Day. Go draw a tree. I will see you again very soon. Bye-bye.