4 Fun Steps in Painting Loose Watercolor Pine Trees

April 24, 2022

If you’re starting to learn landscape painting in watercolor, then you are in the right page! 🙂 One of the first subject to learn in your creative journey is painting loose watercolor pine trees, and it is both fun and easy to do.

In this blog post, I will show you the steps in painting loose watercolor pine trees that you can later on apply in your other landscape paintings.

4 Easy Steps in Painting Loose Watercolor Pine Trees

1. Painting the Sky. The sky is a bit gloomy and so I painted it with a very light Payne’s Grey using wet-on-wet technique.

Note: Although the bottom part will be painted with trees, I extended the grey wash in this area to also set the tone of the painting, being a misty forest of pine trees. It will blend the greens naturally with the grey sky.

2. Painting the background pine trees. Once the sky is done, I started with the furthermost layer of the pines using wet-on-wet technique. Wet-on-wet helps spread the pigments on the paper, resulting in an out of focus style for the pine trees, as well as adding a misty vibe to it.

I did this step in creating 2 layers of pine trees, with the second layer having a bit more definition of the pine tree shape.

3. Building up the background layers. I keep repeating step 2, slowly building up the layers by adding more paint using Sap Green, Hookers Green and a bit of Payne’s grey.

Since we are making an impression of the trees being nearer, at some parts, I painted the pine trees in more details, but keeping the bottom soft for the mist effect.

Then I started painting the base wash for the third layer of trees. Keeping the colours random and leaving out white spaces creates the illusion of the trees being covered in mist.

After which, I added a bit more detail to the first layer as well, making sure that is still appears more faint than the second layer, to match the perspective.

Then for the 3rd layer, I repeated step 2 as well; and for the trees, I painted it in even more detail and made the trees bigger as well. I added in more Payne’s Grey to make it darker than the previous layers.

As a guide, note that I painted the main stem first and slowly create the leaves until I create a triangular shape of the pine.

Once the 3rd layer is done, I added a green and grey wash for the bottom as a base painting for the foreground. It’s the same method as before, only this time I’mu using darker paint, as we are nearing the foreground.

4. Painting the foreground pine trees. After the painting has dried up, I painted the nearest pine trees using wet-on-dry technique using a darker mixture of the same colour.

I took my time painting in the trees here, starting from the branches, and slowly adding in the leaves in random quick strokes.

I keep repeating this method while keeping in mind the shape of the pine tree and slowly building the form downwards. I stopped near the bottom, not completing the full tree yet, and added more trees in random shapes and sizes stopping at the same spot as well.

Once I completed this layer of trees, I painted the bottom in bigger and more loose strokes to blend them all together. This created the effects of the bottom of the pine trees, where the leaves are more dense.

For some parts that have bigger gaps, I added loose pine tree shapes to blend downwards with the thicker paint, and repeated this method until i completed the foreground.

Once I felt the painting is balanced, I then removed the tape and am done! 🙂

And that’s the process for painting loose watercolor pine trees! As you can see, it’s very simple and all we have to do is keep repeating the steps until we achieve the whole composition.

I hope you have fun painting this as much as I did! 🙂

The Finished Artwork

Here’s the final piece! 🙂

You can watch the process video on youtube to understand more, and if you follow through my tutorial, please feel free to tag me with your painting on Instagram so I can see your artwork too! For more tutorials like this, you can browse my youtube channel! Do hit the subscribe button to stay updated with the posts. Thank you!

For more landscape paintings, head on to the Landscape Pages.

You can also try my other paintings at: