How to draw a tree

By Aaron Rutten

Learn how to use Painter’s Particle Brushes to paint a realistic tree trunk and leaves. In this tutorial Painter Master Aaron Rutten starts by creating a simple background of a sky and field of grass. Next, he paints a tree trunk with many forking branches. The branches get smaller in diameter each time the tree forks. After painting branches, Aaron adds leaves to the tree using a custom leaf brush he created using the revolutionary Particle Brush technology found only in Painter. As a final touch, he adds shading to the entire tree to make it look more realistic.

This illustration was created with Painter and a Wacom Cintiq, but you can use any drawing tablet. Many of the digital painting techniques in this lesson can be applied to Photoshop, ArtRage and many other digital art applications.