There are two more common tree shading we can apply into our painting. If we are painting an anime style landscape art, feel free to use a more vibrance colour palette for the trees.Ī quick way to add more colours to tree is by painting the area which receive direct (or specular) and indirect light. Birch tree have white colour bark, while other trees such as rainbow eucalyptus can have colourful tree bark. Then, adding in the smaller details of tree barks. Paint vertical shapes to mimic tree bark pattern.Īs we can see from the two examples above, the important steps on painting tree trunk and branches are determining the light and dark area.Lock layer transparency, then paint the light and dark area of the tree. Pay attention to light and dark area of the tree.Continue to paint different area of the tree with different shades of colour.Paint the shadow terminator area with vertical shapes to mimic tree bark pattern.Area between the light and dark area is known as terminator. Lock layer transparency and paint the bright area of the tree.Draw the contour of tree trunk/branches with a hard edge brush.When painting tree trunk and branches, we are mainly painting cylinder shapes with rough and irregular surface. Duplicate the layer then scale transform (CTRL-T) it and merge them.Draw tree branch with a hard edge brush.

Repeat the steps to form a bigger tree branch. Another quick way to draw tree branch is to draw a simple shape, then duplicate and merge them to form a complex branch. Tree branch can be seen as a fractal pattern.

Lock layer transparency and start shading the tree branches with a brighther shade of colour.

Scale down brush size and draw smaller branches.

For painting, we can further simplify the painting by reducing number of branches splitting. Image above show different shapes of trees.

Sometime it is a good idea to draw them first before painting the leaves, so we would know how our trees will look like. Tree trunk and branches define the silhouette and shape of trees. This quick tutorial will show the steps on how to paint tree trunk, bark and branches.

Tree branch brush photoshop