Building a tree from masses

A tree is not ten thousand leaves. It is a silhouette made of a few big clumps of foliage, each clump a rough sphere with its own light side, shadow side and cast shadow onto the clump below it. Draw it in that order. First the overall silhouette, lightly, as one lobed shape with the trunk's position marked. Then divide it into three to five clumps, overlapping, bigger toward the centre of the canopy and smaller at the edges. Then give each clump a lit top and a shadowed underside, letting the lower clumps go darker because the ones above shade them. Only then, and only along the outer edges, suggest leaves with a broken, scribbled contour.

Corot's trees are the model. Look at The Large Tree: a single dark mass, lit along the top, with the lights lifted out and the branches zig-zagging up inside it. There is not one leaf drawn. Prout's tree study in the Cleveland sketchbook shows the same method in pencil: clumps, scribbled edges, a trunk.

Keep the interior of each clump as flat tone. Texture inside a mass flattens it and kills the light. The eye reads texture at the edge and assumes it continues.