HOW TO ADD TREES TO YOUR LANDSCAPE

I thought it might be helpful to do a short tutorial about how to incorporate trees into your landscape. We will start with fir and pine trees. They are found all over North America and are extremely useful for showing perspective in your scene.
The first pictures are good examples of trees in a scene - notice in the first one that the size of the tree is a great help
in showing the perspective. The larger trees are in the foreground and they are smaller and less precise the further away.

I will start with fir or pine trees. I find that if I am doing a clump of trees it works very well with the branches going down. Make sure that your trees are tall and narrow (they don't look like tipis - or mustaches! draw your trunk or trunks first then start at the top and work down - only the tops have to be precise , once you reach the point where the branches run into each other it is not necessary to draw each tree. See photo. Notice how I have put shrubs and fir trees together. You can also draw your trees with the branches going up. I do them both ways. If you check out the larger tree in the first picture I think you will get a good idea of the shape.

here are some examples of how NOT to draw trees . The next picture shows different shrubs and trees and the 3rd shows different trees from different parts of North America. I have put in one of my forest scenes to show you how effective the birch trees are . I will do a little tutorial tomorrow on how to do these beautiful trees.