Trees are an important part of landscapes and I paint a lot of them. So I'm starting a new set of videos on how to paint trees. Subscribe today to improve your trees and landscapes one step at a time. Here's how to practice some tree basics. Trees come in a wide variety of shapes. It's a great idea to take a sketch pad with you to the park and practice painting a few different tree shapes. Trees can be so many shapes. They can be tall and thin or short and round. The trunk may be mostly covered with leaves and some may only have leaves at the top. You can improve your trees a lot by studying their shapes and the outline of their leaves. While you're doing that, you can also experiment with your colors. Often colors you wouldn't think of as tree colors will work surprisingly well in landscapes. Besides mixing blue plus yellow or your tube greens, you might want to try mixing in a gold, like a quenacridone gold or green gold or even a purple. Let yourself go wild when you practice with your colors. Even purples can look nice in landscapes, although you may want to mix them with some of the other landscape colors. And speaking of mixing, let's mix in some darker green for shading. It will be easier to paint realistic trees if you draw or trace a good tree outline and the shape. This is especially true when the trees run into each other, which is most of the time in landscapes. Now I'm going to show you a fun exercise you can do with leftover paint or try some different colors in to see how they mix. I wet the paper with a big wash brush and put on a little bit of a very light sky blue color. Copal or Cerulean would work well, but ultra marine would be fine also. Then I switch to a smaller brush and I'm using some of those colors that we just mixed up. You see when you put it on wet, it really spreads out. But just like when the trees run into each other in the forest, what you want is variety. So don't be afraid to try any colors. One lady in the class did an entire pink tree line with pinks and purples and all the other students loved it. The main thing you want is variety. Just like we did in the shapes, you want some tall thin trees, some long trees, maybe some bushes, some that are farther away and some that are closer up. If yours dries too light, just dry it completely and then rewet it and have another go at it. The two light trees will look like far away forest. Once you begin to get something you like, smear it line like halfway to a third the way down and you can turn this into the reflections on a pond. I'm going to bring a little of my color down into the pond water. I stuck one end of my brush in a pencil sharpener. So I have a sharpen on this brush and I can scratch into the wet paint or put a little dark there and scratch into that and pull it up. You can also draw in tree trunks with darker colors or opaque white. I think I'll put a darker brush right here. These are never perfect. Everyone's unique and it's a fun way to find out what happens when you use different colors in your landscapes. Yeah, this is getting a little too dry. Here's a reflection of that tree and now I'm taking my opaque white just to put a line across the bottom and just like that you have a nice little lake scene. I'll add a reflection of this guy too. So whether you're working wet on wet or wet on dry, the shapes of your trees make a huge difference. So go for a variety in shape and color and study the trees that you see around you. So subscribe today or visit my watercolor school at devwatson.org. Happy painting and thanks for watching.