How to Draw Oak Bark

Texturing oak bark is a way to show that a tree is an oak, even if it's so close the bark is all you can see in the drawing. It's not hard to draw tree bark accurately once you know what to look for in bark patterns. Every kind of tree has a unique bark pattern. Try drawing it in pencil, pen and ink crosshatching, and colored pen crosshatching in this project!

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Drawing paper
• Fine point black disposable technical pen
• Fine point color pens including light and dark gray, light and dark brown, light and dark green, gold, olive green, light blue, violet or lavender
• Pencil
• Kneaded eraser
• Ebony pencil or 6B or softer pencil
• Photo reference of an oak trunk.
• Workable matte fixative

1. Oak Bark outlines. This can work as a texture by itself. Snap a close-up photo of an oak tree, or search online for images of oak bark. Our example is a Northern Red Oak, but your local trees might be Southern Live Oak, Black Oak or any other variety. There are many types of oaks, but Northern Red Oak is common and it's the oak the author grew up with, so let's go with that for an example.
   
   Vertical ridges break horizontally and don't form perfect ribs. Start in the middle and draw outlines of the shapes in regular pencil. Darken the oak bark lines with the soft Ebony pencil. Don't bother erasing bad lines unless they break up the texture. Don't make the ridges continuous top to bottom, start and stop them the way they look on your photo.
   
   Draw the cracks narrower as you approach the sides. This shows the trunk is rounded before any shading is added. It even looks like shading on the line drawing.
   
   Just to break the monotony, we'll draw a twig with a couple of oak leaves crossing the oak bark texture. It's a quick way to show non-botanists that this tree is an oak, and the bark is accurate for an oak.
   
   Oak bark is forgiving. As long as you get the lines similar to the ones in your photo reference, they will be recognizable even if you don't get them precisely accurate. Draw the oak bark sections about one unit wide to five or six units tall. Cross them with horizontal cracks at intervals and slant them sometimes. Not all the horizontal cracks go all the way across. Some of the bark sections are angled. Some widen or narrow or have other shapes. Draw the outlines of bark sections as you see them, but simplify a bit if the photo's too detailed.
2. Oak Bark drawn in Ebony pencil, showing detailed shading. Shade your oak bark with the Ebony pencil, using medium gray areas and light gray areas. Draw the oak twig with little knobs at its joints and a stem on each of the oak leaves coming from a knob. Shade the oak leaves and vein them, contrasting the leaves with the bark texture. Draw a shadow under the oak leaves falling on the bark, after shading the bark just shade the shadow shape evenly over the earlier shading. Also shade the right side of the oak trunk a little more than the left side.
   
   If your shading makes the lines of the bark sections vanish, press harder and put very dark lines in on the right side and bottom of the bark sections. This will show up against the middle shading. Rough up the lines for the sides of the trunk so that some sections of oak bark show seen from the side.
   
   Oak bark will be lighter on the side that the light's coming from and shadowed on the other side. The cracks themselves may be dark, but that dark line is also the edge of the shadow on the right of a chunk of bark -- we'll put the light on the left for this example. Leave a light edge to each bark chunk and shade the middle medium grays.
   
   You can lighten areas that you got too dark by pressing your kneaded eraser on the drawing and peeling it off. Do not rub. Press and lift until it's as light as you want it, then go in and darken the cracks again.
   
   Following the reference, sketch horizontal cracks and details of flaking bark. When you're finished, clean up smudges around it with your kneaded eraser and spray with workable matte fixative.
3. Oak bark drawn in pen and ink with crosshatching for shading. Sketch two tree trunks in regular HB pencil lightly. One is narrow off to the right, the other is wide and can go off the side of the drawing area. The narrow one is a middle ground tree. Background tree trunks in a landscape could be shown with just one or two lines, so we won't bother with background tree shapes. Now let's draw oak bark in ink on both of these trunks.
   
   Inking the outlines, draw them a little ragged so that the oak bark shapes at the edges are showing texture on the side. Don't shade all the way around the middle ground tree. Draw its oak bark texture by doing just the bottom and right sides of the bark shapes, flicking the long right-side stroke up so it trails off. Crosshatch just the right side about a quarter of the way around to show roundness.
   
   Drawing oak bark in pen is a little different. The lines are describing the shadows of the crack in the bark. They create a gray tone all by themselves. On the left of this ink sketch is a close-up of a large oak tree with the same shading as the pencil drawing of oak bark, rendered in crosshatching. First, draw loosely around the bottom and right side of the oak bark shapes with a fine line to establish where they are.
   
   One layer of crosshatching lines makes the lightest gray, two layers makes dark gray, and the darkest areas have three or four layers. Don't outline the cracked bark shapes in ink for this rendering, just use the crosshatching to make light and dark areas. Dotting lines as they trail off is a good way to get lighter lines in ink drawing.
   
   After shading all the oak bark shapes with crosshatching, crosshatch over the left side of the tree to round it, right over the earlier shading. This is a good way to draw oak bark realistically in pen and ink drawings. If you prefer stippling, you may be taking a long time to shade it in but the effect will be beautiful.
   
   This looks complicated but it's actually easy when you settle down to do it. Shade all the bark sections with one layer at a time, systematically covering the tree. Then shade the other layers at different angles, then add the scribbled darkest cracks last to make the darkest darks. There is a link to a lesson in drawing crosshatching in Resources links if you've never used it before, and that lesson is very easy.
4. Oak Bark with leaves outline sketch for color inking Crosshatching textures with different colors of pens can create a beautiful full color artwork. Let's go back to something like the first pencil drawing and redo it in colored pens using crosshatching to create the textures. The bark is gray, so we'll use gray pens to shade the bark.
   
   First, sketch the outlines roughly with pencil. This scan is a little dark to show the lines that we'll erase after inking. I put only two oak leaves and made them a little fancier. Oak leaves vary in shape too, between different breeds. Look at the real oaks in your neighborhood to draw their bark, their crown shapes and leaves accurately. You can trace around a real leaf to get oak leaf shapes precisely accurate, then use a copier to scale the sketch down to fit your drawing and trace it. Lightly outline the shadows too so that when you cover it with crosshatching in colored pens, you'll see where to put them.
5. Oak Bark with colored pen outlines of shapes My colored pens set has light gray and dark gray, so let's use those and save black and brown for details. On the reference, it looks solid gray without any brownish areas, unlike some tree bark that can be reddish or brownish. Starting with dark gray, lightly define the bark shapes the way we did on the black ink sketch, just rough shapes like fish hooks shorter on the left. Make them wider as you get toward the middle and narrowest at the sides.
   
   Sketch the twigs in brown so that it's easier not to go over them drawing in the bark shapes, and outline the leaves in orange or gold or red -- this one will be an autumn oak tree. Or you could use brown or green for a winter or summer tree. Go right over the shadow outlines, those will not be outlined but just filled in with shadow colors.
   
   This looks a lot like step one, but done in color with color outlines on the leaves.
6. Oak Bark with first layers of hatched shading in colors Go around the oak leaf outlines with red, and put red veins in. Shade with one layer of red hatching over the veins but not quite out to the edges, this is going to make a pretty effect that's very natural. Leaves redden from the edges in and veins outward, so we'll leave some space for yellow and orange shading on the next stage.
   
   Shade the shadows of the leaves in light blue while we can still see the outlines, using smooth angled hatching with spaces between the lines a little wider than a line, or about the same as one line. Draw the shadows of the twigs by doing very short hatching lines one after the other, so that they don't look solid. It's easier to get the shadow in before the shading.
   
   Now use light gray to shade in the oak bark the way we did in Step Three, do the first layer where there's hatching but no cross hatching yet, or darkening for cracks. Let your hatching lines start or end from the U and J shapes of the bark sections, but leave a little space between them and the next section. Shade solidly over the very narrow bark shapes on the right side and for a short distance on the left side to make it easier.
   
   Go right over the shadow shading but don't go over into the leaf shapes. Don't worry too much about messing up the hatching on this stage, the light gray doesn't show much and you can always darken later with the crosshatching. You could even color in bark sections solidly if your pens are broader than mine and your gray is light, but be sure to leave some white showing at the top and left side of the big sections.
7. Oak Bark with second layers of hatched shading and more on leaves Crosshatch the leaf shapes with orange entirely edge to edge. Do two orange layers and then a yellow layer in the last direction. This should make the leaves nice and bright. If you have trouble getting smooth lines over larger areas, go just to the ribs and then do the section on the other side of the rib separately. Add a little more red shading at the ends of the lobes and strengthen the vein lines with red. The leaves are done.
   
   Crosshatch over the shadows in purple, putting more space between the lines because the purple is a darker color. If you have a pale lavender in your set, you don't need to space the lines farther apart. Test patches on scrap paper to see how light or dark it gets to know how close or far apart to get the lines.
   
   Using dark gray again, crosshatch the oak bark sections. Crosshatch a narrower section on the sides for rounding, wider on the right side.
8. Oak Bark drawn in colored pen crosshatching. Because we used blued shadows on the leaves, it would look nice to add a layer of blued shading on the sides where it's rounded. This will still give the impression the trunk is gray, but mostly show that the light is warm by how blue the shadows are.
   
   Use the violet to sketch light vertical lines on or near the cracks, to cool the shadows of the cracks.
   
   Now use black to do the deepest darks on the bark textures, and shade under the twig using violet over the brown. If you are using water based felt tip pens, watch out for any spill or drop of water striking the art, as a drop did fall on the tip of one of the oak leaf lobes. Blot it fast so that it doesn't spread outside its color area. I kept this example anyway because the blot stayed in the oak leaf.
   
   You could fix something like this by taking a pointed watercolor brush and very gently washing over just the leaf, being sure not to go outside the lines. I strengthened the vein lines on the leaves with brown, you could use dark red, but they need to be more visible now that the entire drawing has darkened.
   
   Try drawing oak bark in charcoal, pencil, stippling and painting it in watercolor or opaque watercolor. The more times you draw oak bark, the easier it will be to get the texture right and make your near ground trees obviously oaks even without seeing the leaves!

Tips & Warnings

• Crosshatching in multiple colors can make a beautiful drawing of any nature subject. It's good for showing textures and has more realism than filling in areas completely with colored pens or markers.
• You can do multicolor crosshatching sketches in ballpoint too. It's a good trick for using those fat ten-color multicolor pens to make attractive drawings. Test patches in all the colored pens you have so that you know what each color looks like in a shaded patch before filling areas on your sketch.
• Use oak bark texture as a background for drawing squirrels, chipmunks, small birds and other creatures that live on and around oaks.
• Don't overwork your drawings and get them too dark. If you overwork a pencil drawing, you can lighten it by pressing and lifting your kneaded eraser on the areas that got too dark. Ink stays where you put it, so start over if you overwork the ink drawing.
• Always cap any felt tip pens immediately after use. Make sure the cap is on firmly. They dry out quickly and become useless.