In this video, Allen Picard, a landscape artist, demonstrates how to paint a scene with trees in the fall season. He uses a sheet of sanded Lockhart paper, a vegetable grind surface that offers beautiful tone surfaces. Picard starts by sketching the basic shapes of the trees with vine charcoal, focusing on the solid forms and clear lines on the trunks. He then begins to build initial masses of dark values, suggesting the shapes of the leaves and the sky.
Picard emphasizes the importance of working with negative shapes around the trees, which helps to create depth and contrast. He uses a range of colors, from dark greens to lighter blues, to build the gradation of the sky and the foliage. He also uses a range of brushes and techniques, from soft sable brushes for scumbling to the tip of a soft pastel for layering and sculpting the tree trunks.
Throughout the process, Picard provides suggestions and tips for painting trees, such as squinting your eyes to see only a little detail, using different colors for different textures, and looking for where the light values of the foliage pull out from the mid-tones. He also explains how to add haze to the shadow areas and how to use mid-tones to step the value between rich shadows and the lighter sky or foliage.
In the end, Picard adds some final indications of small branches and restates the tree trunks to give the painting a sense of detail and depth. He concludes by encouraging viewers to get out in their studios and paint their own impressionistic trees.
1. The speaker is Allen Picard, a landscape artist who conducts workshops on painting trees. [Source: Document(page_content="00:00:04.61: hey friends Allen Picard here were in my\n00:00:07.68: studio after I've been away for a little\n00:00:09.81: bit I was just in Vermont and I had a\n00:00:12.57: landscape workshop there as well as a\n00:00:15.03: portrait workshop earlier in the earlier\n00:00:17.46: in the month here in Connecticut I ain't\n00:00:19.80: gave a landscape workshop and I'll tell\n00:00:22.32: you in these workshops people continue\n00:00:24.72: to ask me how do I paint trees what do I\n00:00:28.47: do with all this foliage these leaves\n00:00:31.23: how do I deal with it would you help me\n00:00:34.35: so that's what we're gonna do today\n00:00:36.42: we're gonna do a small painting\n00:00:39.08: demonstrating how I like to handle loose\n00:00:41.94: sound good so here we go\n00:00:45.28: [Music]\n00:00:50.03: all right so we're gonna start on a\n00:00:52.77: sheet of sanded Lockhart it's a\n00:00:55.29: vegetable grind surface that's really\n00:00:59.07: lovely there's a number of beautiful\n00:01:00.72: tone surfaces that the Lockhart paper\n00:01:03.36: offers this is a mid-tone brown I\n00:01:06.00: thought with a fall foliage season that\n00:01:09.51: we're gonna approach in this demo that\n00:01:11.16: that kind of orange and blue quality\n00:01:13.29: that Brown would be a nice under tone\n00:01:15.54: for that surface so that's why I've\n00:01:17.16: selected that color and I'm just gonna\n00:01:19.53: start with a little piece of vine\n00:01:21.09: charcoal and we'll begin okay so the\n00:01:27.18: whole thing here with these trees is\n00:01:31.23: that we'd mass in the big tones we want\n00:01:39.30: to mass in the big toes\n00:01:41.66: [Music]\n00:01:53.93: just gonna mass in wherever I see a nice\n00:01:57.51: solid form get some tone in there quick\n00:02:02.13: indication of the trunks of the trees we\n00:02:05.88: definitely see some clear lines on those\n00:02:08.01: trunks pop them out just a simple\n00:02:15.77: movement of the forms and I'm squinting\n00:02:18.78: my eyes I want to keep squinting my eyes\n00:02:21.57: just I squint my eyes like this just so\n00:02:24.18: that I only see a little tiny bit of\n00:02:27