Trees #art

When I started painting in April 2024 I concentrated mostly on painting buildings or landscapes in which any significant living elements such as trees, animals or people were sufficiently distant that I didn’t have to worry too much about their details. After a while, as I discovered my natural style and approach to painting and gained a bit more confidence in my ability, I began to try putting more detail into my work. In the case of trees, I found that if I slowed myself down, and really paid attention to what I was doing, the results of my efforts were not at all bad. (Sadly, whilst I have had some success more recently painting birds and animals, the same still cannot be said about my horrific attempts at incorporating people into my artworks…)

The set of twelve pictures above, a set that I refer to as my Trees series, were painted between June and November 2025, and ended up being the fifth series of miniature watercolour paintings that I produced. Most of the these series were been produced over a much shorter period of time, typically no more than 2-3 weeks, but with these tree pictures I didn’t set out to generate a full set of twelve pictures, they just emerged gradually, in between all of my other painting efforts. Each picture is a 9cm square, a little larger than most of my miniature series paintings (which are typically ~5cm square), and for this reason, I’ve been able to print larger 16cm versions from the originals, that look really smart in a frame, without suffering from resolution issues.

In most cases, I painted these trees from photographs that I had taken at some point, and so I know (roughly) where most of the trees are. However, there are a few that were based on photos from internet searches, and unfortunately I’ve lost track of the details of those ones – keeping track of these kinds of details is something that I still need to get better at. Working from top-left, across and down the grid of twelve pictures, the pictures show:

• a large tree on the main ridge of the Quantock Hills, above Crowcombe in Somerset, with huge roots that formed a window to frame the view beyond
• twisted branches and autumn leaves (location unknown)
• a lone conifer on the southwestern edge of Dartmoor, somewhere on Harrower Common near Yelverton, Devon
• a view looking back along the cycle path between Clearbrook and Yelverton
• a lone tree of a type that I like to refer to as a ‘symmetree’ in a slight hollow, again on the main ridge of the Quantock Hills above Crowcombe
• my favourite row of beech trees below Peek Hill next to the main road from Yelverton to Princetown, Dartmoor
• beech tree trunks near Grassington in Wharfedale, Yorkshire
• a typically-windswept tree on Dartmoor
• a muddy track through some conifer woodland (location unknown)
• a lone holly tree on Roborough Down
• a view through a group of pine trees, across the Yealm Estuary from the coast path between Wembury and Warren Point in South Devon
• a spectacular autumnal, orange-leafed tree in the gardens of Cotehele House (or it might be in the Lost Gardens of Heligan)

Although they are quite simple, some of these tree pictures – the Peek Hill beech trees, the Yorkshire beech tree trunks, and the pine trees near Warren Point – are amongst my personal favourites of all of the pictures I have painted so far. I’ve listed prints of these pictures (composite prints of all twelve and a smaller square version with nine pictures) and greetings cards featuring individual pictures for sale on Facebook Marketplace and in my Etsy shop, but perhaps unsurprisingly, given the chances that anyone putting ‘tree painting’ into their internet search engine will be directed to my tree paintings rather than any of the hundreds if not thousands of alternatives available, I’ve not had any sales so far. But a family friend was so taken with these pictures that she bought a set of four framed prints of her favourite individual trees as a present for a friend and then came back and bought another set for her nephew! It’s nice to know that there is at least one other person out there who also likes these pictures!