Tips & Techniques

Using a razor blade to scrape additional texture and detail into trees

Transcribed from the program.
I love painting trees. The tree at Emily Dickinson's Homestead was beautiful, and it just sort of hung over the house.

It had a lot of great highlights and texturing from the early morning sun hitting it....

So, I apply the color I want the tree to be, and before the paint starts to dry, I start to scrape it off.

Because I'm left handed, I flip the painting over and scrape in the direction of the cool side of the painting. I can add in highlights this way.

After I scrape a little off, I usually clean the blade with a piece of tissue paper, so I don't get a build up on the blade.

When you are working on a tree, you can scrape almost immediately.

When I was painting the tree at Clarkdale Fruit Farm, I wanted the bark to be fairly substantial.

See how dark the tree I've painted is? Now you just let that set for a second, and then you can start to scrape away. See how that picks up the texture?

I'm just using the edge of the razor blade; I'm not using the whole thing.

You can get a nice gnarly texture by using a blade.

So, experiment with this technique.

Sometimes on a bigger painting, you might want to wait for the paint to dry and maybe even set a little bit, just before the water starts to evaporate.

Back to list of painting tips.