How to Paint a Palm Tree

How to paint a palm tree for beginners

You will need acrylic paint in Brown shades and green shades, paper plate, paper to paint on (I used watercolor paper) and a paint brush (a flat edge brush will work best).

Put you paints onto your paper plate (or other surface to mix your paints), you may need to add a small amount of water to your paints to thin them out a bit. Decide how tall and how big you want your palm tree to be and how long you want your palm leaves to be.

Sketch out the rough outline of the area of the palm tree in pencil or something that can be erased or easily painted over. this is only to get an idea of the size, shape and placement of the palm leaves.

Choose all of the colors you want for your Palm tree (The trunk, the Palm Leaves and coconuts if desired) Trunk- Earth brown, with a misty beige highlights. Palm Fronds- forest green with leave green highlights. Coconuts mix a small amount of forest green and earth brown, then highlight with misty Beige. You don’t have to use these colors, they were just the ones I choose to use. Feel free to use any colors you would like.

Paint the trunk of your palm tree with a darker brown, and add highlights to add dimension. I used an Earth brown for the trunk and a misty Beige for the highlights. To draw the highlights I simply made criss-crossing lines, but remember to not make them too uniform.You don’t need to add too much detail as this is your first palm tree

Get a brush(A flat edge brush will work best, thought other brushes should work too) and dip the tip of your brush into a liberal amount of dark green paint. Then on a piece of scratch paper with the flat tip of your brush draw a line in a sort of half arc lifting the brush as you move down to mimic the look of a palm leaf. Your lines should be dark and thick at the top and lighter and thinner at the bottom. I would recommend doing a few practice leaves on a piece of scratch paper. (The first picture is a line that shows the rough angle your brush should follow and the second picture is a leaf I did on scratch paper as an example)

Paint your palm leaves onto your trunk just as you did on the scratch paper.Then take the lighter green paint and add highlights to the palm leaves. I used the same technique I used to paint the whole leave, but only on pieces of the leaves to help show depth.

Add as many palm leaves to your tree as you desire, I usually do five to six leaves.

Mix dark brown with a small amount of your dark green, so that the color is a little darker than the trunk, paint three small circles under the palm leaves on the trunk and use the misty beige to add highlight to them to look like coconuts.

Add any more details you want and do touch up work as needed. Leave it to dry for a few minutes.