5 Tips for Painting Trees in Acrylics

You don't have to be Bob Ross to paint happy little trees. While his methods and techniques received harsh critiques, Bob Ross managed to bring art into the lives of many people. Understanding the techniques (Bob Ross-inspired or not) and "tricks" of the brush can help you paint trees in your acrylic paintings.

5 Tips for Painting Trees in Acrylics

Start Simple

When painting landscapes in acrylics, you need to create simple trees. Once your simple trees are brushed in, you can work on the rest of the painting and add more details to the trees later. An overworked tree may be distracting in a quiet landscape. If you would like to detail every branch, twig and leaf, try it with pen and ink or pencil rather than acrylic paint.

Keep It Simple: Distance

Keep those trees far off in the distance as simple as can be. Keep them light as well, rather than dark.

No Floating Trees

Unless you root that tree to the ground with a shadow, it will look like a magical, floating tree. Maybe the world of Harry Potter is the inspiration for your landscape. If not, ground that tree with a gray shadow. Payne's gray offers a multi-colored way to create natural shadows. The other way to create a realistic shadow is to combine two complimentary colors, in a watered down version, to create a shade of gray.

Paint the shadow underneath the tree, by its trunk. Extend that shadow to one side of the tree, under the lower branches. Be sure to make your shadows go in the same direction when adding shadows to other landscape objects in your acrylic painting.

Is It Really Green?

Before jumping into the green acrylic paints, take a good look at the tree. If you're not painting outside, you need to go and look at trees before assuming they're all green. They're not. There are hues of gray, blue, green, brown, red, yellow and black. The colors are also not the same at the top of the tree as they are on the bottom. The top of the tree will look lighter than the bottom, and you need to adjust your painting accordingly.

Acrylic paint colors you can use to paint trees include

Payne's Gray
Burnt Sienna
Viridian
Alzarin Crimson

Think Outside the Acrylic Paint Box

Or try these color recipes for painting trees in acrylics. Play with the ratios to make and infinite number of acrylic paint colors and your trees won't look you painted them with a green right out of the box.

Zinc Yellow and Pthalo Blue
White, Cadmium Yellow Medium and Viridian Green
Cadmium Orange and Cerulean Blue