Paint a Tree...Made Easy

Eucalyptus Trees, very large and very cool to paint. Well, in California they are painted all the time. I'm going to show you how to paint one...why? Because if you can paint one of these you can pretty much do most trees in your paintings. The principle is the same. Basically, a tree is a large mass of darks...mid-values...highlights...branches & skyholes and in that order. Trees are not big green pom poms with a brown trunk popping out of the bottom. That's what you paint in the 5th grade. We are going to paint a killer eucalyptus tree that will look great and improve your tree work....thus improving your paintings and skill level.

There are other trees that look quite differently but can be approached in very much the same manner as we are going to approach this Euc. So, here we go........

This is a painting I've just finished but took the time to photograph my tree work to help others that are interested. I've finished my sky work first...I left the area where the tree would be so I don't have to paint over wet paint. If you sketch your tree don't worry about a little sky paint going over the lines...that's ok.

Step 1 Blocking in the Darks...

First I will mix a very dark mix of French Ultramarine Blue/Alizarin Crimson and a dab of Cadmium Yellow Pale. This is my dark mix but you can use whatever you'd like to get a dark mix of green or reddish green or even blue. I go for reddish green. I add Copal Painting Medium made by Grumbacher to all of my mixes. I usually add 5 or 6 drops off of my palette knife or just pour the drops onto the paint mix. You can add as much as you want but remember, the more you add the more watery & transparent it becomes...like a wash. This medium aids in drying time of oil paint and leaves a nice shine to your paint instead of the usual flat look of dired oil paint.

I can either block in the entire tree or just the areas where the dark show through the mids. I've done both so experiment and see which method you like. Here, I've darkend in the entire tree area.

Now, on this tree I am going to have the upper half of the tree catching more light and the lower section in shadows. I like the darks here but I want the bottom really dark so I'm going to add a little more of my dark mix down there to darken that part more. That gets me to this point...

That look pretty good so lets get started adding the mids....

Step 2 Adding the Mid Values...

...or Middle values which are a lower value green mix. In other words trees are like dark green, green and yellow but we adjust all that depending on the tree. Since there are all of these color variations with trees I just call them darks, mids and highlights. My mid green is going to be the same color combination as the darks mix but with less Alizarin and more Cad Yellow Pale. Here is what it looks like as we begin...

I began by painting thicker mids at the top of the tree and thinner towards the bottom with a light touch of the brush. Most of the mids will be covered by highlights but you can choose to leave as much of your mids showing as you like. The mids here will show as a slight ring around my highlights.

Step 3..Adding Highlights...

Here you can see how I have blended the highlight mix to the sunlit area. This mix is the same as before but with more Cad Yellow Pale. I faded my highlights from top to bottom and left to right. My light sorce is from the left so I'm leaving the darker colors to suggest shade on the right side of the tree. Step 4 Skyholes and Trunks...

After the foliage is done we need to add some light peeking through the trees and to hep us shape our tree better. I use just a slightly darker shade of my sky mix to add skyholes. For turnks and branches I've just added light strokes with white and a bit of my dark mix added.

and now the trunks and branches...

The only thing I do after this step is to go around and tweak the tree up...a dab of color altered here and there, some edge work etc...just little things to make it look good.

I think that's a pretty convincing Eucalyptus tree...not the pom pom type of Euc, more the bush looking one that my neighbor has. I have both on my property. So, these are not as hard as you might have thought. Remember, darks, mids, highlights, skyholes and trunks...that's it. Below is how the tree looks in the competed painting....Hope you got something out of this and give it a try.

"Prelude To Evening"

9"x12"

A Nocturne

I don't know why but I really have this thing for nocturnes...I love them. I tried doing one once but it was horrible. Night colors are so different to day colors and I just didn't get it. I loved seeing the works of Whistler and Grandville Redmond and lots of others. They have such an eerie feeling to them, and although I'm not an eerie kind of guy, I'm attracted to them all the same. At the house of a painter friend I saw some nocturnes he had done...really nice ones. Like most of the other nocturnes I had seen before I studied how he handled the scene. Always taking mental notes which is what I do constantly when looking at other artists work.

So....last night before going to bed I decided I might as well try one since I had 2 8"x10"'s gessoed up and ready to go. An 8x10 is not a huge canvas to lose if the painting goes sour...besides, I'm good enough now to recognize a bad piece as it progresses and can wipe that baby down in a heartbeat while the paint is still wet. Frugal...that's what my middle name should have been.

This scene I painted does not exists anywhere except in my head. I wanted sky, a distant mountain range, a big tree and some smaller ones behind it to create depth. There is a tree close to where I live on a slanted hilside that I took pics of the other day...again, and I just tried to visualize it when doing this one. I'm still not the expert at painting nocturnes but I figured the use of blues and greys would mute my colors enough to read as night colors. My tree here probably has too much color in it and in the future I'll try going darker there. The way different artists handle nocturnes is kind of strange...some paint them really dark which makes sense to me...it is night time, but others paint them really bright. Whistler handled them both ways so I'll try the same...the guy was pretty damned good at painting so I have no problem following his lead in variety rules.

I'd like to explain my color mixes better but honestly so much of it was done on the fly I really would have a hard time doing it. I used my usual dark mix for the tree and then added slightly more yellow and grey to make the tree highlights....well, mids because there is no highlights on the tree. The grasses were just using this mid color and maybe adding some barely brighter grey or greens to them in places. Seat of the pants type or work there. The trail started out as just a splash of yellow ochre dulled with dark grey as just a small foreground highlight but my mix was too bright and I used too large of a brush. The first thing that came to mind was it looked like a flat patch of dirt in the dark to me and then I thought "trail"....a dew additional strokes and trail is was. Hey, it's my imagination so I can do what I want there.

Anyway...here is my finished piece which now sits drying on a shelf and I'm pretty happy with it...turned out much better than I thought and most of it done Alla Prima last night. I did however mess with the foreground grasses some more this monring so I can't really call it an alla prima totally...but mostly.

"The Foot Trail"

8"x10" Oil on canvas

and some details....

Painting Portugese Bend

OK.....actually painting the wild mustard at Portugese Bend...which is an area of the Palos Verdes peninsula which is the boot looking piece of land just south of Los Angeles along the coast. It's a beautiful area that I have driven through many times. I was recently invited by friend and fellow painter Bruce, (boomerbeach), from WC to go do some plein air painting and catch the wild mustard in full bloom before it's gone. The mustard here grows to 6 feet tall and some of the areas we walked you were hidden in the mustard. We had a great time.

By the time I had gotten there a lot of painters, including Bruce and Bill Wray, were already out painting. We had about 10 painters show up. I ran into Bill when finishing my painting as he stalked out killer reference shots with his camera. I saw Bruce later at dinner. This was not an offical plein air painting deal, just a group of people getting together to paint and have dinner later. Here are some pics from the day.

The view to the top of the peninsula Mustard abounds....

Me, working it up on the 9"x12" panel. This was a great spot. The field in from of me used to be a bean field way back in the 40's.

Walk to the edge of the bean field and this would be your view down onto the Pacific Ocean. Is this place awesome or what!

That's me, all finished up with my painting. I have done 2 other paintings in the studio with mustard fields and used a brush to do the mustard. On this one I decided to see what using a knife would look like. That decision was brought on by me rubbing on a tinted ground that didn't quite dry and I was worried painting in the mustard would blend too much with the undercoated paint. I think I prefer the brush method though....next time, no tinted ground.

This is where I chose to paint...right off the road next to the beanfield. Took lots of reference shots so I'll be doing more paintings from this area. The cliffs down along the beach are totally awesome and I plan on returning to do some PA work there once I get painting cliffs down to a science...hahaha.

the finished painting.....needs a brush for that mustard!
and a detail shot.....

Adding Color...Flowers

It is almost Springtime here in Solvang...located in the Santa Ynez Valley. This year it hit me...COLOR! I do a lot of driving and have really noticed the color to the landscape that native plants bring. California Poppies, Wild Mustard...I'll do Blue Lupine soon too. Here are some new paintings that I sprinkled flowers in which brings some added color to my usually subtle work. Poppies with a yellowish tint

Wild Mustard in a field near San Luis Obispo

Nice orange California Poppies in Santa Ynez

An Evening Scene

Well, I painted this scene before using a square format, 24"x24". Worked real well and sold in the first show I had it in December in Gallery Los Olivos. It now resides in Kentucky somehwere. I liked the original but felt the colors I used in that one were too light so I decided to paint it again in a much smaller size, 9"x12", and go darker. I recently painted some other smaller 8"x10"'s and they were darker and looked really cool in these new black plein air frames I've been buying. I recently bought a boatload of Windsor&Newton canvases from Jerry's while they were on sale so I whipped this one out today...Alla Prima, in about 3 hours.

I'm loving Alla Prima work and discovered the best way to do one is to not plan to do one! Sneaking up on Alla Prima work is my best way of doing one because when I say I'm going to do one for sure something goes wrong and I work 2 days doing it. Alla Prima - is completing a painting in one sitting. Why do Alla Prima? Because it teaches you what you need to know to paint fast so when you go outdoors to do Plein Air you are only dealing with capturing the local color and light...knowing how to mix fast and get the colors you want is learned doing Alla Prima inside the studio. Knowing how to control your painting techniques is also learned inside....otherwise you are just asking for hours spent swatting flies, wasting paint and coming home with less than a finished painting.

"Evening"

9"x12" Oil on Canvas

Vineyard Scenes

I used to hate painting vineyards...too many rows to mess with and they slow you down. Then I began to realise after painting a few that vineyard scenes usually have the things I like painting...deep shadows, great contrasts in dark/light due to the bright highlights on the tops of the grape plant and room to allow great sky work. They also offer the chance to work on atmosphere as well as give you a chance to work on painting distance into a scene.

Working on these paintings is really good practise in capturing all these elements in a painting so I've done a few of these now. I just recently finished 3 of them and thought it woul be cool to post them together to show the variations in painted vineyards. I am totally no pro at them yet, or with any other subject for that matter, but I am always trying to paint better paintings and this is the price for that...paint, paint, paint.

Here they are..........

Vineyard Shadows

12"x16" Oil on Canvas

Domaine Alfred Vineyard

9"x12" Oil on Canvas

Mosby Sunlight

12"x16" Oil on canvas

Foxen Canyon Field

"Foxen Canyon Field"

20"x20"

Oil on Gallery Wrapped Canvas

I saw this scene one day while driving in Foxen Canyon. That pale blue sky behind the warm earth tones got to me fast and out came my camera. Back in the studio I decided to paint it on 20"x20" gallery wrapped canvas that I had made. I think it is a very cool painting. I have been striving to get grasses painted better so this was a good excercise for that. Sometimes the loose stuff is the hardest stuff to paint. I think I'll make a frame for this one.

Oil Spill

"Oil Spill Training"

16"x20" Pen & Ink - Stippling
First off, I apologise for the terrible photo of this drawing. My scanner is once again on the blink and a photo of a drawing in stippled ink is hard to get right. This drawing of a Coast Guard cutter was submitted by me for jurying into the CG collection in December and got in. Jurying was done by the Salmagundi Art Club in NY. I've already mailed it off so no chance of a decent scan now.

I wish I had allowed myself more time to do this drawing. I had to rush on it and completed it in about 4 days. I should have done it at 11"x14" but being insane I went with 16"X20". Lots of dark fill work and the hull took forever! I'm really proud it got into the collection and hope they don't file it in some dark warehouse now that they own it.

First Serious Artwork

I just ran across this image I had scanned a few years ago. Blair High School in Pasadena was where I actually started my first serious work into art. This all thanks to Mr Gerald Garden and Vince Melie. After I got out of the army in 1979 I went to Pasadena City College. I took aa drawing class there and Mr Melie was my teacher there too. Mr Melie had been all around the world and had the stories to prove it. He was a very funny and kind human spirit. About 2 years after that class Mr Melie suffered a heart attach and passed away. I think of both of these teachers all the time still. Most of these images were paintings or pen & ink drawings with watercolor or tempera washes done in cartooning class in which I sat at a table and really did illustration work. Mr Garden would hand me an editiorial cartoon from the LA times and say "think you can draw this?" and that's where I learned the use of quill pens and my first ink work. I never saw a rapidograph until college. Sometimes Mr Garden would hand me the cover of a sunset magazine and I'd learn to paint using tempera. I did the tall cowboy with the rifle for my Dad for Christmas one year...the Jaws boat was inspired on monday after seeing the movie on Saturday night, (I still won't swim in the ocean!), that was done from memory because computers weren't around to let you look up anything and everything on the planet.

I remember the day we took this photo. I had brought all of my work home from that year 75-76 and my Dad and sisters friend told me to bring it out in the backyard and we'd take a photo...good thing, most of these have dissapeared over the years. I still have the Kissinger Time magazine cover...that was done in Conte Crayon. My Dad still has his cowboy. I also have a small editorial cartoon left too done in ink and stuff called Zippatone for shading...that's how they shaded cartoons back then for the newspapers. I can see these drawings and pretty much remember when I was working on most of them throughout the year. It's nice to have those memories. I'm now a "half a dollar" as my grandma once told me when I asked her how old she was. To me, taking this pic seems like yesterday. Hard to believe it was 32 years ago. Oh, for those of you who don't think illustration board doesn't last, I've got a piece of one with a cowboy holding a rifle on it that looks pretty damned good for being 32 years old!

Nightpainting

Well, just finished doing another painting and the session ran into the wee hours of the morning. I'm trying to catch up to all of the paintings I have not done due to life creeping up on me lately. I actually love to paint into the late night...things are quiet, no one else is awake to bother me and radio just gets better without all of the commercials. The painting on top was finished a few days ago and the one on the bottom took me a day to do. It would have been Alla Prima but I kept stopping to run errands in the car and go eat lunch in front of the tv to catch up on the campaign. I'm loving Alla Prima but I'm still at that stage where if I plan it it doesn't happen...something always stops me. Now I try and sneak up to it! Too this pic right before I went to bed because I wanted to see what the painting looked like when the lights were on it. It was late...or early, about 2AM. The top one is now dry enough for me to sign my name...that will be tomorrow for the bottom one. I try and do that before I move it somewhere else to finish drying because I'll forget until the day I need it for a show or something. So many things to remember.....

Wine Label Commission

As things were winding down at the end of the year, or so I thought, I was contacted by a local vineyard about doing a wine label drawing for them. This is an organic vineyard with a very limited production of grapes to be sold to other labels. They do however hang on to enough grapes to make a small run of their own label in various types of wine, Pinot Noir, Chardonney and a red I can't think of. For their label they choose a local artist of their choice to do their Artist Series wine label.

I drove out to the vineyard and snapped a lot of ref photos with an idea of putting their dog on the label...fat chance, about 3 previous artists did that same dog. They were at the time training a sheep dog to watch after sheep they would use in the future for mowing the grass between the rows of grapes...remember, organic vineyard. I got the idea of putting their sheep grazing in the vineyard so here is how I came up with my label.

Problem 1... it was December so no wonderful thick grapeleaves in sight. Here you can see my angle I would use with the distant mountains...the only thing in this scene I would use. This is one of the refs of the actual vineyard.

Next thing to do was come up with some cool rows of grapes with leaves. I had snapped some ref photos at another vineyard while doing a show there so I used their grapes.

Here are the vineyards sheep who posed for me while eating lots of grass....any grass!I took these images into Photoshop and put together an image that worked...sent it off to the vineyard for approval and then drew the image on illustration board in light pencil to begin inking. They wanted an oval format and I played with the values in black and white to make the image work better for their sake.

My drawing is lighter here. I tend to draw light but that's ok because in working with various printers I found the printing ink usually darkens any drawing a few values. They use the blackest ink I've ever seen for printing. I let the owners know about this and even asked them to reduce the vlaues a bit to make it look better. I didn't like the values in my original drawing...too light and it looks better notched down a bit.Here is a preview of what the label will look like. They liked it a lot. They will bottle the wine next August and release the wine in Feb 2009. A long wait but it will be fun to see the label.

Santa Barbara Streetscene

Tried another streetscene. This time one in downtown Santa Barbara close to State street. The mountain ridge with all of the houses is an area known as the Riviera. Wasn't looking to paint that but it was my background and ads more to the depth of the painting.

12"x16" oil on Canvas

This one had more detail and took about 3 days to finish. Longer than the last but there was more to learn on this one. Here is a detail of the mountains. I like the way they came out, very subtle work there and I'm liking that more and more in my work.

I like keeping some degree of detail in the distant backgrounds but also staying very suggestive with it. Balancing suggestive and detail takes work. It looks easy but it took me a while to get them the way I wanted.

Here is another detail...

Keeping from painting too tight and too detailed on the cars is something I'm reminding myself as I paint. I painted that front van where it looked pretty straightedged but then went back in and loosened it up a bit.

I think the flags look pretty cool in this painting. I don't know why the city had them up but they looked cool. Tried to keep very lose on them. The hardest part of this painting was finding the right colors for the foreground street....shadows still mess with me. Anyway, I think it came out ok for only the second in street scenes that's I've done. They really are very different types of work. Lots of new things to figure out in doing these.

Monrovia Alla Prima

I love when things go right painting wise...your colors are close, the image looks cool and more importantly, the paint tacks up like you want it to! I started this one last night at around 10 or 11 and finished around 4am. Alla Prima work can be so fun and just a fun challenge to finish with a decent painting.

Here I snapped a shot of my darks going in. The sky and base paint for the mountains was done already. I thought I'd add my darks and go to bed but you know how that goes when the painting is going good. Next thing you know it's morning.

Here is the finished painting....it's a scene looking up Myrtle Ave in Monrovia, CA. I've been up this street many times in my life. When I was a kid my Mom used to drive us to JC Pennys which was on the right hand side in this scene. My older brother had to have JC Penny t-shirts so that's where my Mom would take us. Pennys moved to the Arcadia Mall way back in the 70's but all of the buildings on this street are all the original buildings from back then. I used to work just down the street in the 90's. I've been amazed at the work of Brian Simmons who has put out some really cool street scenes in Vancouver so I thought I'd give it a try.

Myrtle Ave, Monrovia

16"x20" Oil on Canvas

And some detail shots....

(Looks like an old rambler!, hahahaha.)

Figueroa Mountains

Figueroa Mountains

8"x10"

Oil on stretched canvas

I received some Grumbacher Pre Test oil paints for Christmas and thought it was a good time to give them a try...good thing because I was out of Windsor Newton cadmium yellow pale!...my favorite yellow for making my greens with. The pre test paints work nicely and I did this one with them.
This scene is looking across the Santa Ynez valley. I just love the colors of our mountains up here. There are so many shades to them and at given times of the day they are luminous shades of blues and greens. Sometimes I think if I paint those people wouldn't believe it. I tried to capture some of that wonderful blue here...I think the intensity is a little strong in this photo but it's pretty close to this. If I painted this scene again I'd lighten the background. I worked on this one and another one at the same time. The other painting is below and you can see how light I lightened the mountains to push the distance more. When painting two paintings of the same area you tend to guage your colors off of the other painting. Fun stuff.

Deer Crossing WIP

I came across this reference photo and decided to paint a scene of it. I liked the distance of the mountains coupled with the dark contrasting oaks in morning light. I was about to paint it and then decided to try something new...add a deer crossing the road. We have lots of deer around here and so it only seemed natural to try and add one to a landscape painting.

Here you can see my initial sketch. Very simple lines of the treeline, road and the deer.I began with my sky colors and then the mountains base colors. I'll add the mountain shadows next. I've also added spots of sky color that will be behind the trees.

Now I put in my mountain shadows and at the same time fill in an area that is toweards the valley floor...fields etc...nothing exact, just suggestive work here.

I now begin adding my darks. This is various mixes of Ultramarine Blue, Cadmium Yellow and Alizarin Crimson.

It's time to put in thwe road and my mid greens. It's starting to come together now. I felt my deer looked a little low so I will move him up a bit before painting him in.This is how I will move my deer up. I first paint in the area under the deer to fill in that area.Now, I will scrub out the painted area that is still wet on the road where my new deer position will be. I use a small clean brush with turpentine to scrub the shape of the deer out. Wipe it off and soak up more of the now diluted paint until the area is clean.

I scrub out just enough of the wet paint to have a nice pretty dry area of canvas to paint in the new deer. I'm not the greatest wildlife painter so please excuse my deer. Maybe if I do a lot more deer I'll get them down better. I tried to keep good loose edges on my deer but I could have gone a little looser I think.

My favorite part of this painting is the nice contrast of the dark green oaks and the far side of the canyon mountains....nice!

And finally, the finished painting. I like it. It was fun adding some wildlife to this piece and really catching the distance of those mountains. I also like the very dark greens in the foreground which adds to the atmosphere of this painting. Trying to catch the light of the day is always a workout and there are a lot of painters who do it very well. It's always some thing to aspire to.