Transparent branches against the sky

One of the readers asked me if I would write about painting branches against the sky. That is one of the things that landscape painters often do. It is one of those effects that really can look good in paint. I am going to show you examples of that by several artists. Some of these I had to enlarge so much they are a little blurry, but I am hoping you will still see what I mean.

This is the English master John Constable. The whole thing is painted transparently and with enormous delicacy. While these are not bare branches against the sky, I think they work the same way. The important thing to notice is how low the contrast is between the leaves and the sky. They are only about 10% different from one another. The tendency of people learning to do this is to make them about 40% different, and they look too heavy.

Here is John Carlson doing the same thing in opaque paint. Incidentally the dark branches are what make this effect work. If you don't put in both the transparent twigs and a dark branch the effect will generally not work. The twigs look airy by comparison to the sky, AND the dark branches. That sounds obvious, but it took me a long time to figure it out.

This is one of mine. I have painted the twigs with an enormous brush. The bigger a brush you use to do this the better (like most passages). It also generally needs to be done over a wet background and in one go. If you fuss with it very much it will fail. Then you need to scrape it off with your palette knife and try it again. Notice to the left the sky holes opening to show the forking branches I discussed last night.

Here is an Aldro Hibbard, There are several trees against the sky here. And each one is different. Notice the nice dragged paint over on the middle right hand edge. He pulls that loaded brush over the paint below in such a way as to leave paint on the ridges of the layer below, but not pushing the stroke down onto the surface.

Above is a slightly blurry Jervis McEntee. I included it because it shows another nice trick. He has indicated the little leaves that haven't yet been blown from the branches. I like to throw a few of them in too. Since they are opaque they heighten the look of transparency in the branches.


Here is a Jervis McEntee from the Athenaeum.org I have made it clickable to a pretty large image so you can look at the nice handling in those branches.Go look at it, it is pretty cool. This is one of my favorite paintings in the world. I had it as my desktop for a long time.

Here is another passage by McEntee. Again he has thrown those little leaves in there. He hasn't used the dragged paint method, that really became popular a generation later, but he does have very thin transparent branches puled over the shy that do about the same thing
Painting branches like this is a practice thing, if you work at it you will be able to do it. But it is a convention to some extent. Seldom will you be able to copy a photo to get it. You will have to install it or paint it from nature. It is an ephemeral thing.

More tree behavior

Now there is a great set of trees. They have come here tonight to make a couple of points. The first is to illustrate something from a post I wrote several weeks ago. I spoke about branching habits and how each specie of tree has a particular angle at which it likes to throw its branches. There are a number of places in the trees above, that show this nicely. Several of them can be found at the 1 and 2 o'clock position.

The thing I wanted to point out tonight is this. Trees in groups don't grow the same way as trees alone. The whole architecture of a tree results from its striving to put its leaves efficiently into the light. As you can see looking at this example there are two major pairs of trunks. Each of these have thrown their limbs up and away from the other pair. It is almost as if by agreement they have said to one another, you take that side, I 'll take this side. There are almost no branches on the inside between the two trees. Those branches that did grow in there, found themselves shaded out and quickly withered. A tree won't support a branch that doesn't produce.

Something else worth noticing here is that the largest sky holes are gathered about the middle of the tree, often showing off those forks of which I spoke earlier. Look for the two to occur together and utilize that to show the structure of the tree. The sky holes tend to decrease in size as they move further from the center of the foliage.

I would like you to notice one other thing here also.

Look at the fork of this tree near the arrow. There is more tree above the fork than below. You would think, given the general rule of continual taper, that would never happen. But it is common. You have to watch for that. Putting it in will make the tree seem more natural. There is no substitute for observation. It is good to know the anatomy of trees but in the end that will only let you know what to look for, and what it is when you see it.

First you draw what you know, then you learn to draw what you see, finally you learn to see what you know

Color and light in different parts of a tree.

Here is another tree with a lesson inscribed on it. Look at the body, or the middle of the foliage. On the left it is that deep green and on the right it is a still darker more violet green. The leaves themselves are of course really the same color. They are different colors and values because of the different sorts of light hitting them. The very green leaves over on the left hand side are being illuminated by reflected light. That is coming from the brightly lit field.

The leaves to their right are in the core shadow. They are the least illuminated part of the tree and receive little light. There are branches sticking out into the light in the middle of the tree, these are receiving light from the sky above, as the tree is somewhat top lit. Top light is usually going to happen in the middle of the day and is generally the least desirable working light in the landscape incidentally. These top light areas are high in value and they are influenced by the color of the sky reflecting in them, particularly in their high lights. The reflected lights are where the leaves act almost as little mirrors positioned in such a way as to turn the sun light and send it directly at you. Highlights in particular tend to be tinged with the reflected color of the sky.

The top of the tree is in the light and is influenced by the color of the light. The more a passage reflects the nature of the light, the brighter it will appear. That is, as the object is increasingly illuminated, the local color and value of the object will decrease and the color of the light and its value will replace them. Although it is not apparent in this photo it is often useful to introduce a reflected sky color as the tree turns over on its top. That is where the planes of the tree are no longer on the side, and facing you, but on the top and facing the sky. Cooling the top of a tree like that will make it "go over", that is, it will seem to round as its form turns up and out of our sight on its way to the other side of the tree. (gee, I hope that made sense).

Often the trunk will be full of reflected light from the ground. This is important because it ties the tree into the same world as the ground. This small percentage of shared color keeps the tree and the ground in the same tonal equation. If there is no common or ambient tonality in a painting it can become a mosaic of unrelated color. And you don't want that.

"V"s in trees

Asher B. Durand, drawing courtesy of artrenewal.org. Here is a a post I wrote about Durand. In the incisive drawings above you can see a phenomenon I would like to draw your attention to this evening, that of inward facing "V" shapes around the limbs of trees.
Here is our trusty field tree again with some lines drawn on it,

What I am talkng about is negative shapes. You know about those. They are the parts of the universe that remain after what you are drawing has been removed. They are very important in getting the parts of a drawing correct. There is lots to be said about them too. But tonight I will confine myself to pointing out their role in drawing trees.

These "V"s are the opposite, and the result of, the forking of the branches as they leave the trunk and then subdivide continually on their way to the light. The positive shape is a fork, the negative shape is a "V". Arrange those "V"s right, and you will have half of the job of defining the limbs of a tree done. I like to move back and forth between drawing the positive and negative forms when drawing trees.

Perspective in the masses of trees

image from artrenewal.org, the fabulous online museum and incomparable free resource for artists, art lovers, and historians check it out here.

Above is a Ruisdael that looks like some of the tree photos I have been showing. Here is a landscape painter showing his love for trees. I think there is something very inviting about this picture. I too would like to walk up that road, take the left and visit the little cottage behind the tree. There is a contemporary painter who also paints little cottages. Notice the elegance and restraint of this painting from the mid 1600's. Different trees have different characteristics, like people. Some are strong and enduring and some are lithe and graceful. Just as if you were painting a portrait you need to ask yourself, what is it that makes this tree, THIS TREE?

It is important also to observe the different proportions of one part of the tree as compared to others, a common mistake is to exaggerate the stem, or trunk of the tree. Perhaps because it is at our eye level that we are so obsessed with it, Someone once said the trunk of a tree is about the same size relative to the rest of a tree as the stem is to an apple. While this is not always true, it does point out the great variation from the ordinary unobserved representation of a tree seen in the wall paper borders in restaurant bathrooms.

Look at the altered photo below, I want to show you something else.

With those rudely drawn boxes, I hope to illustrate something else. That tree is not a flat shape, it is a three dimensional object perspected in space. Its forms are subject to the same vanishing points as everything else in the landscape.

One of the ideas of perspective is that everything above your eye level will have perspecting lines that run downwards. So look for those, and show you know em. They are not very obvious but look for their influence. That will get the foliage and body of the tree up into the air, and over your head where it belongs. Unless you observe the perspective indicated by those boxes you will have a straight on view of the entire tree.You look at the lower part of a tree, and up at the higher parts, at least until it is some distance from you. I have seen a lot of landscapes where the top of the tree is seen from the same straight on point of view as its trunk. I have made a few of those myself.

Snowcamp one is filled and I have only two more slots left in Snowcamp W, if you still want to come, click here.

Design problems in the placement of trees

There are some common errors in placing a tree on a canvas in an outdoor painting. Usually these are wrong. I try never to say always, but................. Above is a scene with a tree that is placed well on the canvas. Below the tree ends right at the rabbet, that's the edge of the frame and not a freakish Englishwoman's misbegotten issue. It is seldom a good idea to jam a tree or anything else up against the top of a painting.

If you do have to chop the top of a tree of to make a painting do it boldly, like this. It is best to end the top of a tree well short of the frame or run boldly past it, like the example below.

Below is another problem child.

This tree "stands" on the frame. That looks artificial too. This happens because what might look like enough of a gap between the base of the tree and the bottom of the canvas, might not be enough when placed into a frame. The frame will cover up to a quarter of an inch at the bottom of the picture .

It is easy for these errors to happen because the trees are so large and the canvas is small. As you paint them you keep unconsciously making them bigger and they assume a size larger than that you intended. It sometimes works to draw a line at their top and resolve you will not enlarge them past that line.

Sky holes 3

I want to show you a couple of great tree painters so that you can look at the restrained and simplified way each of them approached the sky hole problem. The painting above is by John Constable, courtesy of the artrenewal.org. Look at how "big" he kept the shapes in those trees. The sky holes are kept to a minimum and the large forms are dominant over them.When you see it done, it seems no big deal, but when you are confronted in nature by a tree with dozens of holes in it, some hard decisions have to be made.

The next painting is a Corot, look how few sky holes he used, just a handful, and they are carefully placed to both look random and to reveal the shape of the tree. Notice how airy those trees are, their wispy handling makes them look ephemeral. Their beauty is in their delicacy.

Here is more delicacy., this John Carlson is full of soft passages and artfully arranged shapes. The top third of this painting is an arrangement of unique and interesting shapes. These were designed carefully to be both random looking and to carry a concealed rhythmic geometry. Notice how differently each of these painters has handled the similar problems in their paintings.

Sky holes 2

OK, listen up tonight, because this is crucial. Of all the things I can tell you about drawing trees, this is one of the most important. It is also one of the least used and understood principles in landscape painting. It is called diffraction. Because the light coming through a sky hole is passing through a reduced aperture, it is less bright than the sky itself. If you like, think of the tree as "robbing" light from the sky holes.

YOU HAVE TO PAINT SKY HOLES DARKER THAN THE SKY, OTHERWISE THEY WILL JUMP OUT, RATHER THAN HOLD THEIR PLACE IN THE TREE.

In the image above, I have cheated the sky holes up to the value of the lightest parts of the sky. The sky holes become lights hung in the tree.This it what you get without diffraction. Below is the version with diffraction........

I have photoshopped the image so that the sky holes are darker than the sky around the tree. I stuck a square of the value I used to do that, over on the right of the tree. It is not just a little darker than the sky, it is a lot darker than the sky! If you will compare the two versions, the lower one hangs together far better than the upper one. The photograph does record some diffraction, but I have characterized it , shown that I know about it. In this instance, more diffraction works better than what the camera captured. Our job as artists is often to make things look better than the uncritical all seeing lens of the camera.

Skyholes part 1

This grand old tree stands by a roadside here in New Hampshire. It is composed visually of several layers. You have probably seen an opera set or a ballet stage that has flats, or layers of scenery receding back into the space of the stage. Imagine that tree above the same way. The nearest flat, would be the leaves in the light, behind them the next layer is the shadowed interior of the tree, the third layer is the branches, and the fourth layer is the sky behind the tree. I want to spend a little time in some upcoming posts on each of those layers. The first layer I want to address is the skyholes, the patches of sky that appear through the tree within its outline.

I have drawn some lines within the interior of this tree to haul those random holes together into a rhythmic order. If you just scatter those holes about they will look too assertive and each one standing on its own will call for the viewers sole attention. Thereforeit is better if they are related to one another, a constellation of sky holes rather than the machine gunned look. Notice how those lines all have an arching similarity. If the sky holes are influenced by an invisible geometric structure suggested beneath them, they will be simpler and more effective. The idea here is like yesterdays manner of finding order in a grouping of trees, but today we are trying to find order within the tree itself. The lines above represent not the tree itself but the general flow of the skyholes seen through the limbs. I will be back on sky holes tomorrow.

Hidden bounding lines for drawing the forms of trees

I am going to begin to move on to actually painting these trees we have been dissecting. I use the word dissecting because what I have been writing about is tree anatomy. In the comments we have discussed a book written in the early 20th century by an artist named Rex Vicat Cole called "The Artistic Anatomy of Trees". I learned a lot there, if there were a bibliography for this series of posts, Cole would be at the top. It is not easily read though and goes into a lot of detail that is extraneous.

Here is a grouping of trees that we might set up to paint. Below is the same group of trees with the general lines indicated.

In order to get this scene onto my canvas I would draw their outlines something like this. There are about five big shapes there. One of the reasons this scene is attractive is because each of those areas is a different size and shape. As the artist trying to get the picture up and running I need to plan out the simplest "blueprint" of my shapes I can. Now,I drew these lines on the picture with photoshop, which is for me a pretty clumsy affair. If I were working in paint on canvas the lines would be softer. Theses lines look a little like coat hangers, but I think you get the idea. This is a summary, here's another.

Above is the scene and below are the summary lines that would start a block in of the painting. These lines are merely the greatest simplification of where the landscape is and carry the least amount of detail. The details of the edges of the forms are averaged or rounded off. However if you can get this much information onto your canvas you are well on your way to "taming" a scene like this.

Below is the same photo with a few more lines on it. They show the larger " hidden" lines in the forms. You want to look for these and lightly indicate them.

Notice the relationship between 1 and 2, by finding that line between the two and checking its angle you find a lot about about their placement. Look at line 3, see what happens if you imagine it running behind that central group of trees and emerging on the other side. Notice where it would intersect that foreground diagonal were that extended. These continuation of existing lines show relationships between different objects in the scene. Look for them. It is a helpful way to avoid working piecemeal, which is where you have everything on the canvas, but not in its right relationship to everything else. This is a geometric measuring system.

Trees and balance

Here is a view from behind the Inn on Sugar Hill, where I will be teaching snowcamp in a couple of weeks. I have a few places left in each of the two workshops, so if you want to go, you still can. OK lets take a closer look at that birch out there.

When you draw figures, you look for the balance in the pose. Often when I was studying drawing with Ives Gammell we would drop a plumb line from the base of the neck to see how the figure balanced. Trees balance too. For instance this tree's trunk leans off to the left, but above, the foliage counters that . Here, look at this picture below that I have drawn on .

There it is, the shape or weight of the foliage is balanced above the "feet" just like in a figure. However trees have an advantage that people don't, roots. So we are not really seeing all of the tree when we look for its balance. Imagine if you could nail a model's shoes to the floor, they could lean in one direction without tipping over. Sometimes trees operate like that.There are windswept places where all of the trees lean at impossible angles. There are also trees that have lost limbs that seem out of balance. Many of those with some time to grow, will attempt to regain balance above their base.

Some pictures of trees and not a whole lot else

I am so tired tonight that I don't think I can write much. And if I did it might not make much sense. But I have all of these tree photos that I take while I am out painting. I thought I would throw a few of them up for you to see. I will catch you again tomorrow after I have had some sleep and I can continue with some useful information. All of these were shot in New Hampshire. The woods of New England is varied and extensive.

I photoshopped this one a little, I have actually cropped and optimized them all, but this one I tried to add more tonalist color.

This is a piece of woods shot just as the light failed, I like that time of day best.There are so many possible moods in landscape. All of these photos are things I would like to paint. I don't work from photos a lot, but when I look at these I always think I will. I shot a lot more than I used to this year, I can store a lot in this computer and it rained so much this spring that I felt like I should have a backlog of "possibles" in case it ever does that again.

Isn't this place mysterious looking? I haven't really done much to it in photoshop this is what it actually looked like. I think I will use it to make a painting. It looks a little kaleidoscopic or like a colored glass mosaic.

Habits of branching

Here are two wildly different sorts of trees . I am sure you know that's an oak on the left and birch on the right. There are many different trees out there, where you live (particularly you guys in Malaysia and Australia) have a whole different set than we do here in New England. I am no expert on botany, although I know what most of the trees I see are, I observe their differences as an artist at a level useful to me. I am pointing out things to look for that are hopefully common to wherever you are working.



















Different trees throw their branches at their own preferred angle. The oak, for instance on the left, above, sends its branches out at a right angle to the trunk, the oak is a hardwood and extremely stout and strong. Look at this close up of the branch leaving its trunk.

Those enormous branches are cantilevered out into space, there is also a buttress on the trunk, a swelling beneath the branch to help carry its massive weight. The smaller limbs and even the twigs of the tree look to some extent like this too. It is sort of that trees personal "style" or habit. Below is a close up of the branches of a birch.

This is a different habit, The branches fork. They do it at pretty much the same angle, but it is a different angle than the oak. Again that angle is repeated all over the tree from its largest branches to the smallest and into the twigs.

So there is a formula, a mathematical angle that a tree will usually install into its branches. That angle which the tree prefers, differs from specie to specie but each sort of tree has one. Below is an old maple that has a different sort of habit.

This maple likes to send its branches out in a rounded elbow shape. They come out from the trunk and then turn upwards in a gradual curve. To draw these trees it is good to observe how they hold their branches and then characterize it a little. Show that you know it, and then express it to the viewer. Just a little, don't lecture, but show em how your tree works.

Favored and unsuccessful buds

Branches don't grow straight like broom sticks, at least most don't. but they don't wander like errant snakes either. There's a system! Here's a quick idea of how that system works. Now I am not a botanist, and you don't need to be either, so this is a simplified look at what goes on with branching.

A branch starts out as a twig of course, in the spring that growing twig develops buds, they are arranged in different manners according to the specie of the tree. As the season goes on not all of the buds grow equally, some thrive, some are minimal and some die. For instance at the top of arrow 1 is a place where there were two buds, the one that was favored became the continuing branch and the other became a lesser branch. At the fork, marked 2, the right hand bud was so favored that the left hand bud died. At the fork 3 the lower bud grew, and was favored and the upper bud was relegated to secondary status.

As the tree ages these branches grow thicker and become limbs, you can look at the limbs of a tree and see the history of success or failure of different buds preserved there. Some sorts of trees throw buds in groups of three and some in spirals around a stem, and others on alternate sides of a running stem. But in all of those, the turns and elbows of the branches are a record of the success and failure of individual buds in the first season of the twigs growth. Watching for and being aware of that will help make some sense out of the branching and forking of tree branches.

Here is a birch doing the same thing. At 1 the bud that runs horizontally has been favored over the one that runs vertically, usually that happens because the favored branch has a better and less obstructed path to the light. The branches seek to unfurl their leaves in the sun. At 2 the same triage has happened initially both buds formed twigs the same size and as time went by, the more successful of the two was favored. Sometimes a bud will survive as minor branch or twig, and sometimes it will die but each of those events determines the course of the branch.

Telescoping branches

Here's a painting of a tree I made this fall for a show at Old Lyme. This is a studio version of one I made outside. It is an 18 by 24. I thought as long as I was blogging about trees I should show a few of my own paintings of trees. Tonight I want to talk a little more about constant taper. Although trees have constant taper on a macro scale, on a micro scale there is another thing going on, telescoping. Here is another tree below and then a detail of the same tree.

Below is the detail.

Notice that the branch doesn't actually decrease much in size until it hits a joint where another branch leaves it, it THEN continues on, a little reduced in diameter. So it is like a telescope, formed of cylinders of decreasing size not an extremely elongated cone. In other words the branch grows along as a nearly uniformly diametered section almost like a section of pipe, until another branch leaves it, then it continues on in a reduced diameter like a second piece of pipe.

This is part of the reason why most trees have an angularity to their construction, this, section, joint, section construction effects the look of some species more than others, but most have some degree of it.

Tomorrow I will begin to describe branching behavior.There is a lot to this so I am paying it out one concept at a time. Its a little like math, each of these concepts is built upon the back of the last one. So if you don't understand it, read it again before you go on. If I haven't explained it well enough let me know in the comments.