The Way To Draw Fantasy Trees From Real Life

I often go out on a nice sunny day or a terribly rainy day and just take photos of trees and get some great looking reference photos of trees to draw from (I may get some strange looks from people, but who cares?)

Trees and their winding, twisting branches with all that fine detail tree bark that is highly textured just makes me want to draw trees and branches all day long.

Like everything that could exist in a fantasy world it is quite often that what you draw is an exaggerated version of a real life scene or visual.

Look at the photos below and see some of the view points you could possibly draw your trees from. Taking photos really does help you with angles and composition and gives you a valid starting point to draw the trees.

When drawing a tree, the only thing you need to get right is the roots and main trunk of the tree, because once it looks balanced then you can begin to draw all the branches and then the leaves.

So once again the planning of the structure is of great importance.

See the next post on how to draw a tree based on some of these photos above tomorrow, until then take some photos of the things you see.