In The Studio: Work on your brushwork for trees

In the is lesson I want you to focus on the brushwork and variety of your tree forms.  Bare trees are a beautiful motif but can lead to boring paintings if you don’t vary the repeats of width, direction, color, and spacing.  You also have to make sure you are using the shadows on the ground, cast, shadows on the tree, form as a consistent value and appropriate color, not just blue.notice how the variety of values and size make for an interesting composition and how the shadows tie it all together.The spacing of these trees is pretty good the busy left side and the nicely positioned open space and the solid trees on the right.  The shadows really work well to tell the story of bright light.There is really nice balance here between soft blended edges and crisp hard edges which gives this simple subject a lot of life and energy. Again the shadows really help tell the story of the time of day and type of light.