As I said in my color theory post, green is my favorite color, but either in spite of that or because of it, I have had an oddly difficult time figuring out how the color green actually works. I discovered this when I tried to go from monochrome landscapes to color, and I could not for the life of me figure out how to make the vegetation look realistic. First off, let's look at what I was able to do:
Okay, fine--this one is actually pretty damn good. Bad example. But there's not a whole lot of upright clumps of diverse plant life. But yeah, I guess we can linger here for a bit because it's probably the only good part of this post.
Okay, that's enough. Moving on:
This one's pretty good overall as well, but you can at least see where my green problems started to come in: the large batches of overgrowth on the right side of the image are just.... stupid. They're terrible. I've got all this subtlety and interest all over the rest of the painting and then BAM I'm scribbling like a two-year-old. (For the record, when I was 2 I was actually doing some pretty impressive drawings of Sonic the Hedgehog, so I'm not sure where I'm going with this analogy.) Anyway, you can tell that I was at a loss as to how to handle the greenery.
And even more so with this one. There are things I like about this image, but you've got to admit it's a mess. Setting a side for a second the fact that the most prominent component of this image is a gnarly horseradish-colored scribble across the sky, the plants don't read as cohesive units or even cohesive patches of units. It's just a jumbled mess. It's not necessarily ugly, but it's a far cry from what I was going for. So I put together that green color wheel from before and, like any neurotic perfectionist would do, created an entire scientifically informed photographic database of tree taxonomy. I learned FAR too much about trees in the process (although I will say it has enhanced my experience with nature, which is legitimately kind of nice) and compiled, as it turned out, several times too many images to actually hold my interest. I've been putting this post off for a long time because I wanted to wait until my "tree quest" was finished, but now that my most recent tree work is two full seasons in the past, I've decided to admit defeat and declare my tree endeavor to be a partial success while begrudgingly accepting that I will never learn to be good at painting a ficus, a willow, or anything in the mallow family because I just got too goddamn bored before I could get to that corner of the database.
As an overview, most of these are pretty ugly, which sort of demonstrates how completely lost I was in terms of how to paint flora at the beginning of this project. I ended up not being an expert at illustrating plant-life accurately by any means, but I did get to a point where I sort of converged on a style that seems consistent with my artistic style in other areas, and I'm okay with that.
Here are my tree illustrations, organized loosely according to how closely the species were related, and presented more or less chronologically. (Warning: this post gets considerably less interesting from here on out. You may want to escape while you can.)
These were... a nice try. I do like my cursive handwriting, though why I chose to write the word "beeches" in the color of a rusty old muscle car I do not know. It took me a while to get a handle on what the color components of a tree are. Some YouTube videos helped; some common sense helped I guess, but it was much more foreign to me than I would ever have imagined.
Birch trees are a little more distinctive, and that led itself to a few interesting images, although these are mostly terrible.
Here I started to figure out what set of colors is necessary to really make a tree look like a tree. It turns out that for an ordinary green tree, you generally need a really dark green, a lighter green, a medium yellow or yellow-green, and then a highlight color, which is generally pretty yellow. Obviously these maple trees required a lot of different variations, but the same principle seemed helpful to keep in mind for all of them.
Pines are close to my heart since I was raised in Seattle, but evidently I'm not too great at conveying them in a realistic way. I've got a couple winners in the bottom left area though. This is also where I started really experimenting with custom brushes in Photoshop; the ones I used here were mostly pretty gimmicky but I got some interesting effects. I do like the abstract tree at the top with the purple highlights.
And this is where I perfect my custom brush use; by the end of this phase I had created the main chalk brush I used for most of the rest of these drawings and, more interestingly, my celebrity portraits. And obviously I liked that big green one enough to make it the cover image of this post--I like that it conveys a sense of a fully formed tree but is relatively simple and abstract. In other words, it just fits my style better.
These ones are mostly just a refinement of my earlier technique. I feel like this is sort of where I plateaued, and where it started to get reeeeeeeallly boring.
Yeah, I don't feel like I made any major improvements here. Then I tried transitioning off digital and doing a few watercolors:
...And they pretty much sucked, so that pretty much killed my motivation. I was going to do a set of oil trees too, but really... I mean, come on. I drew/painted SO MANY TREES. I DON'T CARE THAT MUCH ABOUT TREES. So I decided to end my obsession right there and go find a new one. (I never really found a new one though, so. Meh.)
I would love to be able to end this post with some "after" images of full-color landscapes with much-improved greenery to show how much I learned and grew from this whole experience. Maybe I'll get around to that someday, but clearly it's not worth holding my breath over. So this ends my mediocre tree archive.