Drawing Trees with Pastel Pencils

Gwynie has send me these sketches of trees that she has done and has asked for my help and comments.First let me say that trees are very tricky to get right as they (in the most part) have no form and as such impossible to copy. Also every landscape artist has their own ideas and style and the beginner has to choose a style that appeals to them.Gwynie has used a mid tone grey pastel paper above and straight away is at a disadvantage as the grey colour does not allow the richness of the greens and ochre's to show through. If the above sketches were on our usual sand coloured paper they would look altogether different.The one I like the best here is the one I have edited and placed as an inset top right. You can see that if this was isolated the appearance of the foliage is not bad at all. Now imagine is this had been done on our sand coloured paper. It is also interesting that this was the last attempt of this exercise Gwynie made, proving that practice does work.What I would suggest here is that Gwynie views as many of my landscape videos showing trees as she can and picks up the techniques I use with my particular style and adapts this to her own work.More Tips on Trees: