Creating Beautiful Trees

As an outdoors enthusiast, mother nature makes her way into a lot of my artwork.

Trees, for example, are one of my favorite things to create. Whether it's a painting, clay sculpture or textured canvas there are so many beautiful ways to bring trees to life in your artwork.

1. Chose 2-3 background acrylics.

2. Squeeze a few dollops of each color randomly over your canvas.

3. Roll your brayer up and down the canvas from left to right. This will spread and mix your paints while creating a lovely textured background.

4. Let dry completely.

5. Use an expired credit card, old business card (I use these because of their flexibility and durability) or a pallet knife to drag your modeling paste over the canvas to create your tree trunk. There is no need to make the tree have perfect edges or to smooth out your modeling paste. You want the tree to look real and have lots of texture.

6. Let dry completely.

7. Paint your tree then let dry.

8. Using a darker color, add shadows to your tree.

9. Mix your tree color acrylic with gel medium.

10. Using your stencil, gel medium acrylic mix and business card, add leaves or flowers wherever you'd like (remember less is always more). Using the gel medium creates a softly raised surface. If you'd rather, you can use modeling paste or just acrylic here instead.

11. Let dry completely.

12. Even with all the texture I love a good 3D element so I added paper butterflies. You can add any embellishments you'd like.

What you need:

Canvas

5-6 acrylic colors

Brayer

Expired credit card, business card or palette knife

Modeling paste

Gel medium

Stencil(s)

Embellishments

Happy Crafting,

Misty