How to Paint a Fall Scene Using Sketchbook Pro for Android Tablets

This is the interface of the SketchBook Pro android app.  It has custom palettes on each side, one for your most used brushes and the other for your current project's colors.  There are sizes to choose from up to 2560 x 2560 pixels. This program has 165 brushes to choose from:  some brushes mimic natural media such as pencils,  markers, airbrush, paintbrush etc., while others are stamps of flowers, grass, silhouettes and more.  You can also customize the brushes by changing opacity, size, jitter, spacing, and more. You can also change your line from free hand to  straight, square, or circular and there are two guides (line and circular).  This app also supports layers.  The amount of layers is based on the size of the painting:  the bigger the painting the less layers you can have because of the amount of memory it uses.  There are many more features that are explained in the help menu. 

I wanted to paint a sky which would complement the fall trees.  The trees are shades of orangish red and gold and the complements to these colors are shades of purple and blue.  Color theory is a very good subject for artists to learn.  Color complements are pairs of colors that produce a neutral color when combined.  The basics are red-green, blue-orange, and yellow-purple.  This principle is usually displayed on a color wheel.  The color picker in SketchBook Pro has a good example of a color wheel.

I started out with a cerulean blue for the first layer of the sky.  I picked a brush that mimics traditional brushstrokes.  Then I painted the sky using an x-shaped stroke.  This stroke helps make a smooth looking sky and it also works well in traditional painting.  Then for the second color in the sky, I added a purple paint layer with reduced opacity.  Since the tablet version of SketchBook Pro doesn't have paint blending like the PC version SketchBook Pro 6, you can adjust the opacity of paint layers for blending.  You can also adjust the brush size and opacity using the resize puck.  There is a smudge tool that blends a little, but it does not give a natural paint look.  However, this layering technique is similar to the traditional painting technique of glazing.  Glazing is commonly used with watercolor, acrylic, and oils.  For traditional media you apply several thinned down layers of paint.

In this step , I used the airbrush with a reduced opacity to add several paint layers to the sky.  First I added a lighter purple to the sky, then I added some more light blue.  To make more light on the horizon I added a light orange and purple and blended it with the airbrush on low opacity.

For the mountains, I added a new digital layer.  I chose the same paintbrush as I used for the sky and picked a grayish-blue color to underpaint the mountains. 

In these steps, I added the highlights to the mountain.  First, I picked a light orange for the highlights and used the same brush as I used on the mountains.  Then I picked the smudge brush and softened the edges of the highlights.  I decided that the highlights needed more texture, so I chose a textured brush and used the advanced settings to customize it.  This brush helped further blend the highlights into the mountain.

For the photo reference of fall trees, I went to pixabay.com and downloaded this photo.  Pixabay.com has lots of royalty free photos that you can use for references.   One of the very nice features of my Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet is windows.  There are quite a few apps that you can open as a window or a dual view.  The gallery is one of the apps that does this and it works great when you need a photo reference. 

Then I picked a brush with a rough texture to give the impression of bark on the trees.  I used this brush to draw thin trunks and branches on a new layer.

In this step,  I added the first layer of leaves, making them a dark rusty color for the underpainting.   It was at this point that I realized I needed to extend the background mountain all the way down to the canvas edge.  Since I had made a separate layer for the trees, it was easy to turn off the tree layer (tap the eye icon on the layers panel) and paint in more of the mountain. Then I turned the layer back on by tapping on the eye icon again. 

So what do you do when this is an actual canvas and you need to extend the mountain?  Well you just have to paint over the trees and repaint them.  There are some advantages to digital painting. 

Here I used the airbrush to underpaint the first layer of leaves and used dark oranges, yellows, and reds.  Then I picked a brush that looked like scumbled leaves and adjusted it to my liking.  When I paint leaves in the traditional way, I use a scumbling technique to get the leafy look.  Basically scumbling means making random, rough brushstrokes.  This technique works great for leafy trees of all kinds.

The last steps were basically just adding highlights to the leaves and creating the tree forms.  I picked lighter shades of yellow and orange and painted them in bunches to give tree branch shapes.  Study your tree forms to see how to make natural looking trees.  To add more details,  I drew some of the branches back in before adding the final highlights.   When painting trees you want some of the branches showing to add realism.  I then picked very light shades of yellow and orange to add the final highlights and give the leaves a three dimensional form.  I covered up some of the branches, but left enough detail to give the impression of a real tree form.  I signed the painting and exported it as a jpeg file.

Since SketchBook Pro has picture sizes up to 2560 by 2560 pixels, you can have a fairly big image to print out.  Fine Art America has print sizes that start at 600 x 600 pixels and up.  For this painting size, Fine Art America will print up to 24 x 24 inch canvas prints.