How to Create Realistic Tree Trunks in Watercolor Painting

On behalf of Tvlessson.com, I'm Sherie Tengbergen. In this clip, I'm going to show you how to use plastic wrap to make wonderful tree trunk examples and texture like you see on this particular tree trunk here. Now, I already have a piece saran wrap down here on this tree trunk. What I did is I took my brush and I loaded it with yellow oker and a little bit amber and burnt siena and I paint the area that I want to have the texture on.

And, it’s nice to put a lot of different colors on there and different values because the messier it looks, the better it’s going to come out when we do our saran wrap. And, what I going to do now is I'm going to rip off a piece of saran wrap here, plastic wrap and I'm going to lay it on this particular piece of my tree. Now, the reason why I did the other section first is because you want to leave this here for at least five minutes or so before the texture will really show.

And, you see I'm using my fingers to kind of push that saran wrap around to get that texture. And now, here’s the hard part. Leaving it along for a few minutes until it’s really going to come and show the texture. And, a lot of the texture you see here on this tree was done with saran wrap. So now, I've got the saran wrap here. It’s been here for about a minute.

I'm going to leave it for just a second longer and I'm going to show you what I do around these pieces of texture that’s been created. I take a darker color and I go and I filled it in end and paint them so that that texture will pop out as I'm doing my tree and it starts looking like roots. So, here we go everybody. We’re lifting this out and look at the nice texture I got from just a piece of plastic wrap.

On behalf of Tvlesson.com, this is Sherie Tengbergen and thanks for watching.