A Recognizable Pine in Under a Minute
Okay. New module. We just spent a whole module on rock, which is slow work — planes, then texture, then glazing, layer on layer, patience the whole way through. Trees are the opposite. Trees are fast, or they should be. That's the whole lesson today.
Brady bet me five bucks once that I couldn't paint a recognizable pine tree in under a minute. I lost that bet twice. First tree looked like a green lightning bolt. Second one looked like a broom. I got so annoyed about losing five dollars to my own friend that I went home and did nothing but pine trees for about an hour, which is a stupid way to spend an evening but it worked. I can do one now, reliably, in under a minute. That was the real payout, honestly, more than the five bucks he never actually made me pay.
I'm telling you that because I want you to lose the bet a couple times too. Don't expect your first tree, or your fifth, to look like a tree. Expect it to look like a lightning bolt or a broom. That's normal. Keep going.
Why speed matters here
Trees in a landscape are usually midground or foreground shape-fillers. They're not the subject most of the time — the mountain is the subject, or the canyon wall is. If you spend three minutes fussing over one pine, you'll tighten up, get precious, and it'll read as labored instead of growing. A tree that took you forty seconds looks alive. A tree that took you four minutes looks like you were nervous the whole time. People can tell.
This is the same thing I say about skies, actually — fewer strokes, commit, walk away. Overworking is overworking whether it's clouds or conifers.
The actual technique
You need a brush with a good point. This is one of those spots where a cheap brush will lie to you — if the tip is already frayed or blunted, you cannot make this stroke, and you'll blame yourself instead of the brush. Test it wet against your palm. If it doesn't snap back to a point, it's not going to hold a pine shape for you today.
- Load the brush, a darker green, maybe a mix with a little blue or a touch of burnt sienna in it depending on what you're going for — I don't have a clean recipe for you, I mix pine green by eye every time and it's different every time. Aim darker than you think, because pines usually read dark against sky.
- Touch the tip to the paper near the top and pull straight down a short way for the leader — the very top spike of the tree. Barely half an inch.
- Starting near the top, make short diagonal jabs down and outward, alternating left and right, working your way down the trunk line. Each jab starts fat at the trunk side and drags out to a thin point away from it. Think of it like a zipper. You're not painting individual branches, you're painting the impression of branches stacking on top of each other.
- Widen your jabs as you go down. Near the top the tree is narrow. Near the bottom it's wider. That's basically the whole shape secret — narrow top, wide bottom, straight trunk line holding it together.
- Stop before it's done. This is the part everyone fights me on. You want maybe seven or eight tiers of jabs, not twenty. Twenty makes it look combed and fussy. Seven makes it look like a tree that's been standing up American Fork Canyon for sixty years not caring what you think of it.
- Let it dry. Don't go back in to "fix" a jab that looks wrong. One overworked jab in an otherwise loose tree is nothing. Six overworked jabs and the whole tree tightens up and dies.
Timing yourself, actually
Set a timer the first few times. Not to stress you out, to prove a point to yourself — you have way more time than you think, and also way less patience for tiny corrections than you think. Both things are true at once, and painting is where you find that out.
If your paint dries out mid-tree because our air pulls water off the palette fast, that's not a technique failure, that's just Utah air. Reload and keep the rhythm going. Don't stop the whole gesture to remix a perfect color match. A little variation tree to tree, even branch to branch, is what makes it look like a tree instead of a stencil.
A caution
If you're loading dark green straight from a tube pigment, some of those (phthalo especially) stain hard and fast on the paper and even harder on your palette and clothes. Rinse your brush well before you set it down on anything you like.
Before next time
Do ten pines. Actually count them. By tree six or seven you'll feel the rhythm show up on its own, and that's the one you want to remember, not the first one.