Super easy and fast way to paint trees in watercolour! Step by step notes in the captions below and also a video to follow along to here:
You can use any green but I like to use a mixture of hooker’s green, ultramarine blue, and burnt sienna to create a rich forest green.
Gently scrape your brush off the edge of your palette so that there isn’t a big droplet of paint at the end of your brush. It’s easier to get defined lines if the brush isn’t overloaded.
Honestly this is a really easy and fast way to paint watercolour trees. This is just a 1/2″ flat brush. Hold the brush vertically and just use the very tip of it to tap the paper where you want the top of the tree to be.
As you tap the paper, the lines will create the branches of the pine tree.
Angle your brush out slightly up and away from the center of the tree and tap a few more times.
Go back and forth from one side to the other dabbing your brush and pivoting your brush.
It’s super fast to dab in the rest of the tree.
Try not to fill in every gap. You don’t want it to look like a perfect triangle. In fact it looks better if there are a few air holes left where you can see through to the sky.
If you would like to add in some depth, and variety, it looks great to dab a couple of other colours into the tree while it is still wet.
Ultramarine works great with forest green and it will blend into the tree to create some shadows.
I mixed a little aureolin yellow with hooker’s green and dabbed it onto the other side of the tree.
If the paint on your brush is wetter than the paint on the paper, then it will create little wet puddles which will dry with an outline.
These puddles are often called blossoms, runbacks, or cauliflowers, and they are caused by wet paint trying to bleed into damp paint.
Once the paper has already started to dry, the paint loses its capacity to mix together and blend on the paper, and it resists against the wet paint which sits on top and the tension created between the wet and damp paper causes pigment to be pushed to the edges of the wet area and dry darker than the rest of the painting, making what looks like an outline.
I’m not saying you need to avoid this, as it can look great, especially in a tree like this, but it is really good to know why blossoms happen and how to avoid them if we need to.
You can avoid blossoms by matching the wetness of your brush to the wetness of your paper. So you could mix more pigment into your paint mixture, or you could dab off the extra wet paint on an old tea towel.
Here I’m just adding some ultramarine blue to my second tree while it is still wet.
A little hooker’s green mixed with aureolin yellow dabbed in to create some bright areas within the branches.
Have fun painting!
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In this course you will learn all the techniques needed to build a solid foundation in watercolour, and how to overcome common struggles that beginners normally encounter. You will see each technique demonstrated in a step-by-step, easy to follow manner with a pace specifically geared towards beginners. I demonstrate everything twice so you can relax and watch the first one and then paint along with me.
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