Oil Painting Techniques for Tree Trunks

Many techniques are used to paint tree trunks with oil paint.

Trees have been featured in fine art oil paintings since the popularization of oil painting in Europe around 1400. Tree trunks, branches and foliage were mostly background painting elements during the early Renaissance. By the 16th century artists began painting pure, tree-filled landscapes. Impressionist and modern artists devised many methods to convincingly paint tree trunks.

Glazing

Dutch and Flemish Golden Age painters developed a refined glazing method to define tree trunks and other landscape elements. Complete a highly detailed, monochromatic underpainting of the trees using grayish tones. Use the underpainting as a chromatic and tonal guide for realistically rendering the trees' trunks. Build up the contrast between the trunks and the sky or background with transparent layers of thinned out oil paint. Create light and shadow effects by overlaying glazes of pure color. Mix colors optically from light refracting through the layers of paint.

Direct Painting

Paint tree trunks with a direct painting method known as alla prima, or premier coup. Do the landscape in one sitting, with a single layer of paint. Draw the trunks in bold outlines. Fill them in with brush strokes of pure opaque colors that follow and describe the trunks' contours. Define the details of the tree bark with dark-toned expressive strokes. Use loose, free brush strokes to describe the trunks, with no retouching or overpainting.

Impressionism

Give the trunks a sense of immediacy and capture an impression of how they look under the day's particular lighting conditions. Make sunshine effects the point of the picture. Study how light and shadow define the trunks and suggest the volumetric forms with patches of broken color. Paint the edges of the trunks with exaggerated yellow and orange colors suggestive of bright light. Lay in shadows of contrasting complementary blues and purples.

Wet-in-Wet

Paint tree trunks using a wet-in-wet technique for a hazy, ill-defined look. Brush on a large wash of paint of paint for the sky or background. Use tonal or chromatically graduated washes to suggest depth. Start the wash with light tones and finish it with dark colors, or vice versa. Get a soft, fuzzy effect by painting in the trunks with dark earth colors over the still wet layer. Learn to control the colors as they run and bleed together.

References

• Essential Vermeer.com: Glazing
• The Art World: Impressionist Painting Methods
• Jess Bates: What is Wet-On-Wet
• Art Encyclopedia: History of Landscape Painting (1500 to Present)

Resources

• Drawing-and-Painting Techniques.com; How to Paint Trees; Drew Melton
• Oil Painting With Ethan; How to Paint Leaves on Trees; Ethan Semmel