Exercise: Step-by-step guide to draw an Italian pine tree 🌳✏️ (Patreon)

Hi everyone!This is my very first how-to-draw blog post. I hope you enjoy this tutorial as much as I loved creating it for you. Please let m

Hi everyone! 🤗

This is my very first how-to-draw exercise. I hope you enjoy this tutorial as much as I loved creating it for you. Please let me know if you have any questions. And don't forget! Having fun with the tutorial is the most important part. Let yourself make mistakes, it's all part of the process ❤️

In this week's exercise, I will guide you through drawing an Italian pine tree. I have always loved them, they have such a beautiful shape.

Materials

We are going to use coloured pencils and brush pens. Of course, you can use any colour or material you want, or the same colours and materials I used with drawing this tree. Every choice is okay 😊

The materials I used:

Royal talens A6 sketchbook

Tombow brush pens 912 (Pale Cherry) and 126 (Olive green)

Faber-Castell polychromos Earth green yellowish (168), Juniper Green (165), Dark Indigo (157), and Burnt Siena (283)

Step 1: Creating a rough sketch

I always make a sketch first with one of the lightest colours I will be using for the drawing. This time I used my earth green yellowish pencil. This way we won't see the marks through the drawing when it's finished. Some tips for the sketch:

Make sure the middle stroke of the tree is the widest part.

Every branch, that grows out of the previous one, will be smaller when you go up.

When you're finished, you can erase the pencil strokes lightly.

Step 2: Adding the base layer

For the leaves, I used the olive green (126) Tombow brush pen. To get the typical pine tree shape, hold the brush pen slightly at a parallel angle of the paper and draw little oval circles in a horizontal direction.

For the branches, I used the orange/brownish (912) Tombow brush pen. Make sure that the tree trunks are biggest at the bottom of the tree and grow smaller and smaller when you go up.

Step 3: Shading

To add some shading to the branches, I used the burnt siena pencil added as a second layer onto the base layer. Also, we add some branches between the leaves with the burnt siena pencil. Make sure you follow the directions of the branches.

For the leaves, I first used the earth green yellowish to add some shading and contour, as you can see at the top where I added some sharp lines to point out the contouring of the tree. The light is coming from above, so we have to make sure to leave some light sections in that direction.

Some tips for mark-making:

Hold your pencil a bit parallel to create softer marks

Hold your pencil up to create sharper lines (you can play around with putting more and less pressure on the paper).

You can also play around with how many times you sharpen your pencil. You can learn more about mark-making in this blog post: Exercise: Mark making

To add even more depth, we will add more shading with a darker green colour. I used the juniper green (165) pencil. Make sure you only add the darker colour to some sections of the leaves and only on the bottom of different sections so you can see that the tree is coming towards you.

For the branches, I decided there should be even more shading to create more depth. For this, I used the dark indigo (157) pencil. I only added a small mark to each branch. Don't forget the branches between the leaves.

Step 4: Finishing

To make the tree a bit more playful, I added some scribbles to finish it off.

Here you go! I hope you had a lot of fun with this tutorial, and of course, I'm very excited to see all your results!

Have a nice day! 🤗

Celyn 🌸