One of the hardest things about painting foliage is that it is translucent, which lends itself to a wide range of greens, even on the same plant. You can have light hitting the front of one leaf, next to another where you are seeing the light filter through from behind. It is sometimes easiest to group together pieces of foliage where possible, finding a color that can suit a whole area that averages together the large variety of colors and values that can be visible in foliage. Use the marks made on the edge of your shape, and perhaps some marks made within, to help define it as foliage, rather than worrying about each individual leaf.

With foliage, it’s easy to get caught up in all the leaves, but don’t forget about what supports those leaves! Showing where the trunk and branches of a tree show through can give the viewer useful information, making these details more important to a composition than the actual foliage. It can transform indistinct green shapes into a tree, with just a few strokes. How dense are the trees? In the treetops, foliage may all blend together, but closer to the ground you’ll be able to see the tree’s trunk between them. At the trunk height you may see light coming through from beyond, or you may have a forest where you are seeing mostly shadow.

As light pours through foliage, you may see sunbeams. They can be especially prominent when there is a lot of dust, moisture, or smoke in the air for light to catch. The sun hits these particles and you can see the path of the sun as it passes through leaves or clouds as a three-dimensional object. Or, conversely, with similar conditions you can have a shadow beam if instead of having mostly shadow and a little sun, you have mostly sun with only a little blocked out (like sun on a building casting a huge shadow, or sun on a single tree or gravestone.).

Aside from the foliage itself, we have to figure out how the light filters through the leaves. This can create tangled shadow patterns of dappled light on the ground, but just because they look complicated doesn’t mean sketching them has to be!

Try looking at these shadows as a single, broken shape. Like a slice of swiss cheese, the shadow shape will have holes in it. Instead of having to paint the shadow of each individual leaf, play with the outline of the shadow, leaving unpainted areas within it to give the idea of dappled light. If you are working in an opaque medium, you can add dots of light back in over your shadow, or if you are using graphite, you can erase out areas.

“Late afternoon sunlight filters through the leaves of the crabapple tree and casts dappled shadows on the slats of the open gate. The road outside is bright with sunlight, which also catches the tips of the agapanthus flowers next to the path.” —Alex Snellgrove