Put trees in the picture
Paul Weaver explains how to add trees to your watercolour landscapes, with advice on simplifying shapes and mixing colours for seasonal foliage
Paul Weaver explains how to add trees to your watercolour landscapes, with advice on simplifying shapes and mixing colours for seasonal foliage
Trees and foliage are important features for the landscape painter, conveying a sense of scale, distance, light and shade, as well as suggesting location and the season. A group of sunlit trees can make a fascinating subject or provide valuable tonal contrast for defining other forms, such as buildings, rocks, boats and people. As organic forms, they may be more forgiving to draw than a Venetian palace, but still require careful observation of form, tone and colour to make them look convincing.
Distil the essentials
There are as many ways of interpreting the landscape as there are artists, from fine botanical detail to complete abstraction. My approach lies somewhere in between these two extremes. With both feet in the impressionist camp, I look for the abstract pattern of shapes that convey the effects of light, while adding just enough detail hopefully to make sense of it all. It’s often a bit of a juggling act, best summed up by focusing on the essentials rather than counting leaves and branches. A single tree is a shape on its own, while a group of trees can also be seen as one connected shape to help simplify a scene.
That first impression is so important. A beautiful view or atmospheric effect may stop me in my tracks in a second, long before I notice any details, so it’s important to hang on to that in the painting. Squinting at the scene is helpful in this respect as it enhances the abstract pattern and makes tonal contrast easier to define.
Basic techniques
Applying this principle of less-is-more, the drawing, the watercolour basics and a minimum of materials are all I rely on, and often complete the work with only three or four colours and one brush. Shape, edge, tone and colour are the cornerstones of any painting and once I have decided on the subject and composition, each element in the scene is related to these key points and a few basic watercolour techniques.
I see everything in the subject as a shape. A shape can be soft, broken or sharp in definition, light or dark in tone and warm or cool in colour. The essential language of watercolour starts with the wash and the bead of liquid it creates. This is the vehicle for getting the pigment across the paper.
If the paper is wet, then the wash will create soft and hazy edges. If the paper is dry the shapes can be sharp or broken. Sometimes a shape will have a combination of edge qualities throughout, so strategic wetting is required to soften passages of colour while maintaining sharper definition in others.
A tree in full leaf, for instance, may have a rough and ragged silhouette but have soft-edged shadows within. This dictates the painting process, starting on dry paper to achieve the broken edges, then working into the form while it is still wet to create the shadows.
Economy of brushwork is important. Through trial and error I have come to realise that every mark will register, so when trying to convey an impression, it’s important to make each mark count! The busier the surface becomes, the more cluttered and messy the final result. James Fletcher-Watson’s motto of ‘20 miles into 20 inches’ is worth remembering, as distances and the
shapes within the picture plane are reduced and compressed, so is our perception of detail.
When painting a mass of foliage for example, I draw the main shape with the point of the brush, then block in the form with the side of the brush and as few strokes as possible. A little splattering with the brush or an old toothbrush is useful for keeping things lively and creating texture in the foreground, but I avoid dabbing and stippling at all costs as this simply creates myriad marks that can make the surface too busy. It all comes back to that first impression and how much information is required to tell the story.
Seasonal structure
With spring and summer foliage, trees and undergrowth create full shapes with ragged edges and a few gaps here and there. Moving through into the autumn and winter months, apart from the evergreens, the foliage thins out and eventually falls completely, revealing the skeletal forms of trunks, branches and twigs. This is where the dry-brush technique is most useful, requiring a rough surface paper and a sensitive hand for the best results.
Dry brushing is a contradiction in terms as the brush is fully wet and loaded. The key point to practise is the pressure on the paper. By dragging the side of the brush with a featherlight touch across the surface, the wash catches on the texture of the sheet, creating directional, broken marks. With practice, this technique can be used to suggest the entire skeleton of a winter tree, from trunk to twigs, just by varying mixes and the brush pressure.
Pine and fir trees demand a different approach as their foliage consists of needles rather than leaves. Dry brushing can be useful for trees that are close enough to register texture but is too much of a good thing for trees further away. I use a controlled wet-in-wet technique to suggest these features, drawing the tree shape into a damp wash with a rich mix to create the soft-edged silhouettes required.
Palm trees make wonderful shapes to practise economy of calligraphy and dry brushwork; the huge leaves remind me of giant feathers, hanging down from the top of the trunk.
Colour
Colour is so subjective as we all see things differently. A few colours can go a long way and my palette consists of a selection of primaries, with a few earth colours and a couple of bright accents such as cadmium orange and viridian for good measure. When it comes to choosing and mixing colour, the important thing for me is to paint what I see and feel, not what I know.
For some reason, green is one of those colours that can be a challenge to interpret in the landscape. In the summer most trees and foliage are green, but it’s what the light is doing that counts – that is what creates the tones and colours we see at a particular time of day. When in direct sunlight, the foliage will be bright and warm overall, but the shadows beneath will be cool and dark. Winsor yellow and French ultramarine or cerulean blue make a bright spring or summer green; cadmium yellow creates a deeper, warmer hue. Late summer creates darker, earthy greens and some foliage may be starting to go brown, so an earth yellow like raw sienna or yellow ochre will tone the green down and make it less vibrant.
Red is the complementary of green and I will use permanent magenta or alizarin crimson to make a grey-green for shadows or within the foliage or trees viewed in the distance. I may also add cobalt blue directly into the shadow areas while still wet, using the cooler colour temperature to enhance the visual mood of cool shade.
Viridian is the only pre-mixed green I have in the palette. A bright, vibrant and staining colour to be used with caution on its own, but when mixed with a little alizarin crimson it calms down immediately – perfect for the cool greygreens seen in the distance on a misty morning. When viridian is mixed with burnt umber or burnt sienna, it makes a great start for pine and fir trees.
Raw sienna and burnt sienna are my base colours for autumn foliage, with accents of cadmium yellow and orange where required. Alizarin and French ultramarine with a touch of burnt sienna is ideal for the rich dark shadows within the leaf mass. On the topic of shadows, there is often a lot of colour to be seen within their shapes, so it pays to study them carefully. I see the shadow as a darker version of the colour it is falling across. After all, it’s the same surface, just without the sun on it. Including colours seen in the surrounding sunlit surfaces helps suggest the effect of transparency and reflected light within the shadow.
Ultramarine and burnt sienna produce a good range of rich darks for the trunks and bare branches of winter trees, while light red and cobalt blue are useful for mixing the subtle warm and cool greys of massed twigs and distant belts of trees and bushes.
When a tree is close enough to see the structure more clearly, it’s worth remembering that the trunk and branches are cylinders - tubular forms that will convey the light and shade as well as the foliage. Painting the entire trunk with the light tones first, I add the shadows while the shape is still wet to help suggest the rounded surface.
In summary, along with skies, water and buildings, trees and foliage are prominent features in the landscape that demand careful observation and practice.