How to Draw Snowy Pines in Colored Pencil

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Jay French at jayfrenchstudios.com, and I'm going to show you how to draw snowy pines in colored pencil. All right, we're going to start out in pencil beforehand just to get ourselves a rough idea of something to follow. Let's get a little snow dune going on here, and let's just do one major tree. Now even though a lot of pines, their leaves stick upward, when they're weighted down with snow they're going to hang, they're going to hang over like that. So, we're going off the page, and it's going to make the whole tree lean a bit too. So once you got at least some general idea of where your, where your limbs are going to be, you're going to be thinking about, the limbs, you're going to be thinking about the snow as kind of random, hanging on there. But you can do that without actually having to draw that stage. You do that by using an olive green here, and pines use it great because again in nature you can be a little imprecise and you really can't tell if you got it wrong. So what we're going to do is we get the underside of the branch, with the pines and then we get the shape of the snow on top, and then we'll show you how to do the top edge, but you just keep doing that, we're just going to do one side to show you. Remember there's not going to be any snow on the under side. And normally I'd probably be sharpening this pencil as I go along, but we go up here too and some of it's actually going to be on the top of some of these, shorter limbs will still get some upward point to them because they're shorter and there's not as much length to weigh down. Make that bottom edge where the snow is uneven, you could even do it like that, do the snow edge first, although it's - then you have to follow the lines, it's a little trickier. So I'll tell you one more level down and then we're going to use a very pale blue to do some rough shading on that bottom edge there. And then use that to make the top edge and it doesn't have to be as extreme, it can be a little softer as a sketch there, and where the top edge of the snow is. Now if you want to get real realistic and detailed, go over this blue with a gray and then blend it with a blending stick, a blending pencil, or a white pencil. And get a little lumpier on the snow up there. And when you get to the opposite side to get this all to mesh together, you'll want some areas that just fill in between, and you can have some more snow showing in between there too. And I'll just show you a little bit there. And again you have the soft under side, the outline for the top edge, and we got some going on over here behind, and some you can just see through. And we'll continue like that. Some of these snow areas will even go on to the next limbs like that, making them connect across, and some of them will actually be in front. And that's how you get started with drawing colored pencil snowy pines."