First find your tree. This is not as easy as it might appear... trees have a habit of looking unbalanced, awkward or just plain crazy! Despite Nature's best endeavours, not all trees make good subjects. Finding one with the appearance of good balance can take some time.

Maybe you prefer to design your own? The same rules apply. Unless a leaning or grossly unsymmetrical tree is going to be of some advantage to your drawing, you would benefit from first studying trees and their growth habits to learn the basic rules. Personally, I nearly always work from photographs that I use as a base from which to work. I might occasionally draw one just as I saw it but often I will amalgamate elements from two or more trees into one. But, whatever your approach, one aspect remains constant - trees posses three-dimensional form. For simplicity I will concentrate on common deciduous trees but similar rules and techniques will apply to evergreens.

Trees are not flat structures of entwining branches. Some branches will extend to each side, some will recede beyond the trunk and yet other will be pointing straight at you. A country walk in Winter offers a good opportunity to study this. Later, when the trees are clothed in leaves, you can study the same ones again but with a full knowledge of their internal skeleton.

Brought right down to basics, a tree in leaf is like a lollipop or candyfloss on a stick - a round or conical shape on a long pole. You will see that these basic, three-dimensional shapes conform to normal lighting expectations. They posses a shaded side, a highlighted side and a shadow beneath. You may also incorporate reflected light on the dark side of the trunk if it will help you to better show it's edge.

Keep this basic shape in mind as you work, coupled with the chosen direction of light, and the tree that you produce will possess an overall reality of form.

There are, to my mind, three major aspects of a tree that make it what it is. Surface texture and shape, internal bough structure and gaps through which you can see through to the other side.
It is only by analysing what you see that you will gain the full understanding that allows you to draw realistically. A tree is not an amorphous collection of leaf-shaped items or random marks that, you hope, will fool the viewer's brain into reading "tree". A tree is an ordered, layered object with an outer covering (often partial) around an inner armature or core. How you draw it, the technique you choose to use, is determined largely by the position of the tree or bush in your composition - foreground (where each leaf shape is discernible), background (where the leaves form a mottled pattern that describe the overall three-dimensionality) or midground (somewhere in between the two). For the basis of this tutorial I'm going to choose the midground scenario with illustrations of the other two. So let's pick up a pencil and draw tree...



To make life easy the "clothing" of a tree can be broken down into a collection of similar elements. Just experiment with small sections until you arrive at a texture most resembling the effect you wish to attain. In this case the tree is in the midground so the "leaves" only need to appear as highlighted points where light reflects from their variously angled surfaces.

My technique (as shown above) involves three stages:

1. Map out a loose framework for the internal and external structures.
2. Working in random patterns, create a flat depiction of depth. By this I mean vary the weight of your pencil marks, graduating from dark to light, leaving more negative space between the marks as you progress. This method involves a combination of negative and positive drawing - the shadows rely on the positive, weighty pencil marks and the highlighted areas are produced by drawing around the white "leaves". More leaf, more highlight. Less leaf, more shadow. Work quickly - speed fools the brain. Tap into your creative side by working too quickly for your logical side to keep up.
3. Finally, reinforce your deepest shadows (leave no negative spaces) then add overall tone as required to each area of foliage so it possesses a roundness that conforms to your chosen direction of lighting.

Adjustments can be easily made with Blu-Tack, which is why I advocate placing the final shaping-tone on top. Blu-Tack can lift this off so gently that the detail below is left undisturbed and can be continually adjusted and re-adjusted with little harm to the under-drawing.

With practice some of the early stages can be dispensed with. For example, the trees to the left of our example tree (see below) merely had their positions marked in my line drawing. The trees themselves grew organically as I worked. I had only to decide where the sun would catch their tops before starting out.

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