How to Paint Realistic Trees

I have been asked many times to explain my technique of painting realistic trees. So I have dug out some old reference photographs that I thought you might be interested in seeing (click image to enlarge).The sections of this painting shows the sequence I use when building up the foliage starting with the medium toned greens to the strong browns and black tones. The pencils I used and reference above are from the Faber-Castell range (download our colour chart here). Notice on the first section there is no sky colours between the foliage at the top, this is added after this stage as you can see in the second section. Note too that the light tree trunks stay light until the very last section. The effects you get with trees using pastel pencils are stunning.Scotney Castle has always been one of my favourite paintings and has been the subject of numerous demonstrations all over the country as well the youtube clip having the most hits of all my clips (watch below), I think you can guess why. You can learn to draw this picture by downloading my workshop pack here.