One of this week’s 2D challenges on CGHub was titled “Tree of Life”.
I came upon it by chance and decided I would give it a try.

It is a known fact amongst artists that painting foliage isn’t easy. Most of them, even great masters of the past, avoid green entirely. At this point I should be mentioning a famous quote by a great painter, but my memory sucks so just take my word for it: painting green isn’t easy and few people like it. As it happens, I’m no exception, and I have issues with it. Sometimes.

The thing is, it’s not just Green. In an environment dense with foliage there are lots of things happening to light and colours. Firstly, light is scattered everywhere, and it changes hue depending on what it runs through or bounces off.
In a canopy, leaves facing up tend to reflect the blue of the sky and lose saturation (assuming they’re beneath a clear patch), leaves tilted towards the ground get more yellows and browns. Some of them are more transparent than others and might get as bright as lanterns if, for example, the sun is directly behind them.
BUT. If they’re thick and the light isn’t strong enough they just get rim light, scattering the beams around to complicate your life even more.

All leaves have the bad habit of casting shadows onto each other, shadows that can take on all sort of tints depending on the colour of the light they generate from, and the colour and value of the leaf they’re cast onto.
Most of them are also quite reflective, and have highlights of all sorts. Those closer to the ground are darker and warmer and usually stand out from the dirt, which is more often than not a pretty low value. Higher leaves are (usually) colder, and the light of the surrounding sky tends to bleed over their edges.
Long story short, drawing leaves is a bitch, at least for me.

This is why I decided to take part in the Tree of Life challenge, I need to practice on green.
I didn’t really do any research into the Tree of Life thing. I just meant to draw a vaguely fantasy-looking tree and see what happened.

Eventually I decided I didn’t need to paint lush vegetation, which I guess is a bit of a failure considering the reason why I decided to paint a tree in the first place.
However, leaves in this case would have distracted from the main focal point of the composition (the big ball of branches with the mystical fairy light in the middle), so I’ll have to postpone my practice on leaves to some other time.
Lots of green here, though.

For the time being, here’s what I came up with.

And here’s the process as usual.

If you want to know more about painting foliage, there’s a number of awesome posts about it on James Gurney’s blog (there’s a list of links to other related posts at the end of his entry).