Watercolor illustration of trees-How to draw a cotton tree illustration with watercolor effect in Adobe Illustrator?

How to draw Zhou Mengdie’s tree illustration

Zhou Mengdie’s tree illustration can be drawn according to the following steps:

1. Prepare canvas and painting tools, such as pencils, Colored pencils, watercolor pens, etc.

2. Use a pencil to lightly outline the shape of the tree on the canvas, including the trunk and branches.

3. Use colored pencils or watercolor pens to fill in the color of the trunk and branches. You can choose dark brown or black.

4. Use colored pencils or watercolor pens to fill in the color of the leaves. You can choose green or other bright colors.

5. Add details on the trunk and branches, such as the texture of the bark and the small leaves on the branches.

6. Finally, you can add some natural elements around the canvas, such as flowers, grass, or streams, to enhance the natural feel of the entire painting.

7. After completion, some transparent paint can be applied appropriately to increase the depth and three-dimensionality of the picture.

The above are the basic steps for drawing Zhou Mengdie's tree illustrations. The specific painting techniques and styles can be adjusted according to personal preferences and creativity. How to draw a cotton tree illustration with watercolor effect in Adobe Illustrator?

First open Adobe Illustrator, then use a pen to draw the branches of the cotton tree flower, and then fill all the branch paths with brown color.

Then set an earthy yellow gradient to fill the dark and highlight areas on the branches, giving the branches a three-dimensional feel.

At this time, continue to use an orange gradient and an earthy yellow gradient to fill the branches. In the dark area, we use a translucent gradient color to fill it to highlight the layering effect.

This step begins to draw the cotton of the cotton tree flower. We draw the path of the cotton and fill it with a radial gradient from yellow to white. The highlight area is filled with translucent white, and the dark area is filled with translucent orange. filling.

Then we continue to use the same method to draw the small cotton on the left side of the big cotton.

Next, we use a brown gradient and an earthy yellow gradient to fill the leaves of the cotton tree flower. The outside is dark and the inside is light. Continue to use the method in the previous step to fill the cotton flowers inside the leaves.

At this time, you will find that a yellow to white gradient is set. We use this gradient to fill the path of the flower. We fill the dark area of ??the flower with yellow, and fill the highlight area of ??the flower with translucent white.

Finally, we used the same method to draw another flower below the cotton tree flower. Then, we used white as the foreground color to fill in all the stars around the flower to complete the cotton tree flower picture design. The beauty of color is always found in the smallest details丨Color Utopia

Black and red koi, yellow and green mixed forest, orange and green citrus, yellow and red camellia, and indigo and purple sea

Color is a symphonic poem of beauty, otherwise why can I feel the natural atmosphere brought by colorful colors just by reading the text?

“Yellow reminds me of a summer dawn a long time ago. The promise I made that day.

Now it is the color of nostalgia and hope. ”

△"Full Moon" Munira Naki, United States

< p>Wood encaustic painting, 2017

"I like to create with magenta, the color is full and beautiful."

△"Gravity Impact" Ash Keating, Australia

p>

Painted with synthetic polymer pigments on linen canvas, 2017

“Black is a wonderful color. It always exists as a background, silently.

But when it comes to expressing, it is quick, sharp, and smart."

△"3-C" Don Worthing, United States

Drawed with oil paint on wood panel, 2014

“Purple is the color of shadow, that’s where it really belongs.”

△ "Making Mistakes" by Ian Wells, Australia

Painted with oil and acrylic on traditional plaster, 2017

“Blue is by no means a changeable color. It is a primary color, among many others Color is born of blue.

Maybe sometimes we don’t pay attention, but it is always there and affects us all the time. ”

△"Untitled" Connie. Goldman, USA

Acrylic painting on wood panel, 2017

“Green is the color of contemplation. Only when I am alone in nature, far away from the distractions of the world, can I You will feel the tranquility and serenity most truly."

△"Restrained Frankness" Peter Summers, Australia

Painted with oil on linen canvas, 2015< /p>

For as long as humans have existed on Earth, color has played an integral role in how we describe the world around us.

Humanity’s exploration of color has continued for thousands of years.

In the earliest times, people extracted mineral pigments from nature.

In early civilized societies, people learned to create colors that did not originally exist in nature.

So there are the colorful manuscripts of the Middle Ages, the artistic achievements of the Renaissance, and the vigorous development of modernism in the 20th century.

Modern science has brought us more brand-new colors, some are extremely bright and beyond imagination, some will make the three-dimensional sense of objects disappear out of thin air, and some can even appear in complete darkness. glow.

Spanning thousands of years, the history of pigments is long and lengthy.

They "travel" around the world in various strange ways. If you want to know all about pigments, open this book.

The Utopia of Color: The History of Color in Pictures

[UK] Written by David Coles

[Australian] Photography by Adrian Rand< /p>

Huazhong University of Science and Technology Press - Books are the best

June 2020

Some pigments come from the land under our feet, and some are extremely expensive. Only Only kings and popes can have it.

Whether they are high or low, they all bring beauty to the world.

From ancient times to the present, all stories about dragons and beetles, alchemy and poison, slaves and pirates have relevant and vivid descriptions in the book. Without exception, they are inseparable from the creation of pigments. connect.

Don’t hesitate, let’s color surf together.

Lamp black has existed since prehistoric times.

This light-fast, long-lasting, opaque blue-black pigment was used by the ancient Egyptians more than 4,000 years ago to paint murals, especially tomb murals.

Compared with the gray and black of charcoal, lamp black is more delicate and deeper in color, which was quite popular at the time.

Lamp black, as the name suggests, is made by collecting soot from oil lamps. The production process is simple: suspend a cool flat plate over the fireworks produced by burning grease, and the carbon will be deposited on the surface.

The legendary ancient Greek artist Apelles invented a lamp called "ivory ash" by collecting burning ivory ashes.

Lamp black has been used to make ink for writing and painting since ancient times. The particles are very fine and do not require further grinding.

The Chinese, who were contemporary with the first Egyptian pharaoh, mixed lamp black and animal glue to create Chinese ink. In recent years, real lamp black pigments have generally replaced various greases with acetylene gas, and the resulting carbon black is also purer.

This was the first synthetic color.

The invention of Egyptian blue was around the same time as the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza, dating back about 5,000 years ago.

The ancient Egyptians believed that blue was the color of the sky. Since natural blue minerals such as azurite and lapis lazuli were extremely rare, they figured out how to make their own blue pigments.

Getting Egyptian blue is not accidental, but is created through precise matching.

This kind of pigment is made by heating lime, copper, silica and natron. The Egyptians can extremely accurately control the temperature in the kiln at close to 830 degrees Celsius during the firing of raw materials.

The blue on the famous Queen Nefertiti's crown is Egyptian blue. This pigment is also widely used in murals, sculptures and sarcophagi.

It spread from Egypt to the vast territories of Mesopotamia, ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. This pigment was also used in the murals of Knossos Palace, Pompeii and ancient Rome. .

Egyptian blue was widely used throughout the classical era, but with the decline of the Roman Empire, the production method was once lost.

Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798 further promoted the research on Egyptian blue. Finally, in the 1880s, the chemical composition of the pigment was identified and the manufacturing process was regained.

A beautiful but deadly pigment.

Realgar is called the "ruby among arsenic" and is extremely toxic.

This red ore crystal can be used to produce rich orange pigments, but its main component is arsenic disulfide. Realgar usually occurs in the same deposits as the yellow arsenic mineral orpiment, and is more common in geothermal fissures near hot springs.

Realgar was not used much in ancient Egypt, but artists from Mesopotamia to India and the Far East favored realgar.

In ancient Rome, realgar, like orpiment, occupied an important position in the pigment trade. The ancient Romans used it as an orange-red pigment for painting.

Although the realgar orange color is extremely attractive, it has many terrible uses. Throughout the Middle Ages, realgar was used as rat poison. In China, realgar is often sprinkled around houses to repel snakes and insects.

The 16th-century Italian painter Titian was one of the few realgar advocates. Realgar is rarely used in European paintings. The reason is probably that there was another orange pigment in Europe at that time, lead, which was easier to use and more popular.

In the 18th century, less toxic and more stable pigments appeared, and the use of realgar gradually decreased.

The Utopia of Color: The History of Color in Pictures

[UK] Written by David Coles

[Australian] Photography by Adrian Rand< /p>

Huazhong University of Science and Technology Press - Books are the best

June 2020

This famous pigment comes from carnivorous sea snails.

Atayal purple is extracted from a local mollusk in the ancient city of Tire in Phoenicia (in present-day Lebanon, Phoenicia means "Purple Land").

The production of Atayal purple has a history of at least 3,500 years.

In ancient Greek legend, Atay violet was discovered by Hercules. Once, Hercules saw his dog's mouth full of purple and realized that the color came from the snails the dog had just chewed.

Each snail produces only one drop of dye, and one ounce of this purple dye requires approximately 250,000 snails.

During the peak period of Atayal Purple production in the Roman Empire, the rancid odor emitted by millions of rotting snails could be smelled in the city. This means that the production of Atayal Purple was approaching the edge of the town. Piles of shells are still scattered along the eastern Mediterranean coast.

In ancient times, only those with high status had the right to use Atayal purple. In the ancient Roman Empire, the regulations on the use of Atayal purple were even more stringent. Only the emperor could wear clothes dyed with "real purple".

Those who wear Atayal purple clothing without permission will be severely punished, including confiscation of property, deprivation of official positions, and even death sentences.

After the Crusades and the fall of Constantinople in 1204, the method of making Atayal Purple was gradually lost in the process of Western civilization, and was not rediscovered until 1998.

Is it a berry, a seed or something else?

In fact, the red scale insect is a wingless scale insect that grows on large red oaks in southern and eastern Europe.

A red dye can be obtained by carefully scraping the red scale from the branches of the red oak tree, crushing the female red scale covered in resin, and then boiling it in lye.

Historically, red scale pigment was a very important textile dye imported by the ancient Egyptians from Mesopotamia. Its trade routes once covered all trade routes from Europe to China. area.

During the ancient Roman rule of Spain, half of the taxes paid to the capital were paid with red scale dye.

The name red scale comes from the Sanskrit word "krim-dja" meaning "from the worm", and in Hebrew it is called "tola'atshani" meaning "from the worm" The scarlet color of bugs”.

With the discovery of the New World in the 15th century, red scale pigments were replaced by cochineal pigments. By the 1870s, the history of using red scale pigments as textile colorants in Europe was gone forever.

The ship sailing from Yemen to Egypt was carrying the dragon's blood.

Elephants are constantly fighting against bloodthirsty dragons. The weather is cold and the dragon is eager to drink the blood of the elephant, so when the elephant passes by, the dragon will lurk on both sides of the road and wrap its long tail around the elephant's hind legs.

When the elephant fell to the ground, it pressed on the dragon. At this time, their whole bodies were stained red with each other's blood. The dragon's blood and the elephant's blood were mixed together, and after cooling, they condensed into a substance called draconic blood.

——This is a fantasy story about Dracula told by the 16th-century navigator Richard Eden.

In fact, Dracaena is a garnet-red resin extracted from the Dracaena tree on Socotra Island.

The fantastic name Dracaena comes from the book "Natural History" written by the ancient Roman writer Pliny. This book was written in 77 BC. Two years later, Pliny died in Vesuvius. The volcano erupted.

Dracaena has long been used as a colorant and medicine, as well as in alchemy.

As a pigment, it is mainly used to color varnish. Apply to gold to create a more ruddy effect. In medicine, dragon's blood can treat diarrhea, skin diseases and high fever.

The Utopia of Color: The History of Color in Pictures

[UK] Written by David Coles

[Australian] Photography by Adrian Rand< /p>

Huazhong University of Science and Technology Press-Books are the best

June 2020

The king of palettes in the Renaissance was more expensive than gold.

Ultramarine is extracted from the natural rock lapis lazuli, which has been imported from Afghanistan for thousands of years. The name comes from Latin, meaning "blue beyond the sea".

Ground lapis lazuli is light blue. Although the color is lighter, it has been used in Byzantine manuscripts and Afghan murals as early as the 6th century.

Lapis lazuli contains pyrite and white calcite impurities, which need to be removed first to obtain the ultramarine color favored by Renaissance painters.

The extraction process is said to have originated from Arab alchemy in the 9th century, including how to grind lapis lazuli and how to mix it with a paste of wax and resin, which is complex and time-consuming. The mixed paste is repeatedly rubbed and washed in alkali solution to obtain blue lapis lazuli pigment.

Only 4 grams of pure ultramarine pigment can be extracted from every 100 grams of lapis lazuli. Due to its high cost, this pigment was used only for the most important paintings, such as those of the Virgin Mary.

Most painters will apply it in a thin layer on top of an opaque base together with glaze to save costs.

In the 19th century, cheap synthetic ultramarine was invented, and natural ultramarine soon fell out of use.

It is well known that vermilion drove miners insane.

In 1566, the King of Spain sent those sentenced criminals to the mercury mines of Almaden to serve their sentences.

The working conditions in the mines were harsh and dangerous, and the toxicity of mercury was well known. At that time, it was difficult to find workers to volunteer to work in the mines.

Prisoners dug cinnabar mines and extracted mercury from them. Cinnabar is used to refer both to natural mercury sulfide and to the opaque bright red pigment made from mercury sulfide.

In the second half of the 16th century, one in four prisoners died before being released.

Vermilion is synthesized from mercury sulfide. Its production method was introduced to Europe by an Arab alchemist around the 8th century.

The lump obtained by this process is black, but when it is ground on a flat plate and mixed with water, it turns red.

Vermilion can be combined with two basic substances, sulfur (once considered a base gold) and mercury, which made alchemists extremely interested in it.

For medieval manuscript illustrators,

the most important yellow came from the stamens of the saffron flower.

At that time, 8,000 hand-picked saffron flowers were only enough to dye 100 grams of silk thread.

The orange produced from saffron is more intense, highly pure, and translucent, and can be used to depict the color of gold foil.

Saffron color was originally called Persian yellow, and the ancient Sumerians used saffron as perfume and medicine.

The ancient Egyptians used it to dye mummy bandages, and the Roman emperors used it to scent their bathtubs.

Since ancient times, people have used saffron to dye fabrics. It was used to dye the yellow robes of ancient Chinese emperors.

Except for the difficulty of collecting saffron stamens, the entire paint production process is extremely simple. You only need to soak the twisted saffron threads in the glaze overnight.

Unfortunately, this kind of orange fades easily. In the existing medieval manuscripts, the green trees, grass and clothes that were originally mixed with other colors are now only blue.

After the emergence of cheap and non-fading synthetic pigments, saffron’s mission as a pigment soon ended.

The Utopia of Color: The History of Color in Pictures

[UK] Written by David Coles

[Australian] Photography by Adrian Rand< /p>

Huazhong University of Science and Technology Press - Books are the best

June 2020

This medieval ink began with gall bees.

In spring, gall wasps prick the soft new buds of oak trees and lay their eggs inside. The oak trees gradually grow small nut-like protrusions around the bee holes.

These protective bumps are oak galls, the basis for making thick black ink.

In Europe, tannic ink has been the standard ink used for writing and painting since at least the 5th century, and it was still in use until the 20th century.

The dyehouse workers harvest the oak galls from the oak trees and grade them according to their maturity and tannin content.

Blue and green oak galls are not fully mature, contain gall wasp larvae, and have high tannic acid content.

Adult gall wasps are found only in white oak galls. In order to escape, they will bite a hole in the oak gall.

To make this tannin ink, crushed oak galls are soaked in water and fermented to release thick brown tannins.

Good tannic acid ink will usually gradually darken, showing a rich purple-black color.

This ink adheres strongly to parchment or vellum and, unlike India ink or other formulations, does not fade even with repeated rubbing or washing.

In contemporary Britain, all official certificates of births, marriages, and deaths are still written with this tannin ink.

Is this red really made of blood?

As early as 700 BC, this bright scarlet pigment had been used in the Americas, where the Incas and The Aztecs cherished this red pigment.

Carmine is the reddest dye produced in nature. The scarlet color comes from carminic acid, which is secreted by female cochineal insects to drive away other predators.

It takes approximately 14,000 female cochineal beetles to produce 100 grams of carmine lake pigment.

When the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortes entered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in 1519, he found the market there filled with bundles of fine yarn. , the yarns are all dyed a particularly beautiful deep red.

After Spain conquered the Aztec Empire, cochineal also became an important export product of Spain.

In order to protect their unique export items, the Spanish tried their best to conceal the source of this red dye, claiming that the pigment came from a pea-like plant, and the dried cochineal insects did look very Like shriveled berries.

The initial misleading rumors made cochineal one of the most closely guarded trade secrets in history. Even today, only cocaine is the only crop in Latin America that can compete with cochineal in price. Compete for superiority.

This is a toxic yellow pigment.

Garcinia is extracted from a tree unique to Southeast Asia, similar to the rubber extraction method -

People make a deep incision on the trunk of the Garcinia tree , carefully place a hollow bamboo tube underneath, and the milky yellow resin will fill the bamboo tube.

The collected resin is baked on a fire to evaporate the water. After drying, the resin solidified into a columnar shape is taken out and ground into a bright yellow powder.

In the 8th century, Japanese, Chinese and Thai painting pigments were all made from this resin.

At the beginning of the 17th century, Garcinia was introduced to Europe. As a transparent warm-toned pigment, it was deeply loved by local artists, but later people discovered that Garcinia was still most suitable for painting watercolors.

The British artist Turner is a representative figure who uses Garcinia in his creations.

Unfortunately, like many organic pigments, Garcinia will fade quickly under strong light and is now rarely used in paintings. New light-resistant synthetic pigments have been invented to replace Garcinia.

The Utopia of Color: The History of Color in Pictures

[UK] Written by David Coles

[Australian] Photography by Adrian Rand< /p>

Huazhong University of Science and Technology Press-Books are the best

June 2020

This color is as scary as its name.

This dark brown pigment, also known as mummia (mummy) or caputmortuum (dead head), is made from the skin, flesh, bones and wrappings of ancient Egyptian mummies (human and animal).

In medieval Europe, this brown substance made from mummies was believed to have medicinal properties. This belief stems from the medical use of bitumen by the ancient Greeks.

Doctors continued to use mummy palm to treat illnesses well into the 18th century.

In 1586, an English traveler named John Sanderson visited an ancient mass grave in Egypt and wandered among the corpses.

He described how he "broke off different parts of the skeleton and brought back different parts of the skull, such as the head, hands, arms and feet, for people to view."

Mummy brown was used in painting as early as the 16th century, and was most widely used in the 18th and 19th centuries. This dark brown pigment is transparent and is often used in oil painting creation. The relationship between light and dark.

As people gained a deeper understanding of its chilling origins, they also had more and more respect for the importance of ancient Egyptian culture and art, and people slowly became less enthusiastic about collecting and buying and selling them. This pigment is no longer used for painting.

Mummy Brown gradually fell into disfavor and was basically abandoned by the end of the 19th century.

This deadly green pigment contains copper and arsenic.

Scheleer’s green is an opaque yellow-green pigment invented by Swedish chemist Carl Scheele in 1775.

Scheler's Green was invented to replace the copper-based pigments patina and malachite green. Due to the extreme scarcity of green pigments at the time, Scheler's green quickly became popular as a painting pigment.

However, because Scheele's green is toxic and changes color when exposed to acid and sulfur, it soon fell out of favor.

In 1808, when people tried to improve Scheler's green, emerald green (copper acetyl arsenite) was developed.

This is a longer-lasting pigment than Scheele's Green, but it will still turn brown when exposed to sulfur-containing colors such as cadmium or ultramarine.

However, emerald green was more vivid than any previous green, and it quickly became a favorite among dyers and artists.

Emerald green is obtained by the reaction of patina and arsenic compounds. Like its predecessor Scheele's green, it is extremely toxic.

Unfortunately, emerald green is widely used in wallpaper printing and its fatal toxicity was soon exposed.

When pigments react with moisture in the air, toxic arsenic-containing vapors are produced. In humid climates, these toxic vapors can kill children in daycare centers.

As early as 1815, people began to suspect that the problem was with pigments, but it was not until decades later that the use of this pigment in daily necessities and food was completely banned.

Emerald green is also called Schweinfurt green, Veronese green or Vienna green - in fact, it has more than 80 different names, and the different names also conceal it to a certain extent. its notoriety.

“I finally discovered the true color of the atmosphere,

It is purple”

In 1881, Claude Monet said the above Extra words.

The Impressionists loved the new color so much that critics said they suffered from "violet mania."

Manganese violet pigment was invented in 1868 and played an important role in modern art.

Manganese violet has a relatively low production cost and presents an opaque purple-red color. After its advent, it quickly replaced the weaker cobalt violet.

Although the coloring degree of manganese purple is average, the purple is exquisite and lustrous. This characteristic is completely consistent with the theory of Impressionism.

Impressionist painters believed that shadows are not black, but have color, and their color is the complementary color of the light source.

The Utopia of Color: The History of Color in Pictures

[UK] Written by David Coles

[Australian] Photography by Adrian Rand< /p>

Huazhong University of Science and Technology Press - Books are the best

June 2020

Restore the original appearance of nearly 60 colors and listen to them tell a colorful world .

_A unique perspective rarely seen on the market

Did you know that the noble purple is made from carnivorous sea snails? Can you imagine that the pigments used by painters were once deadly metals , toxic minerals, urine, feces, or even crushed insects?

It is unique and original, focusing on the past and present of colors and pigments in human history, and revealing the production methods. It is a fascinating color book Popular science reading, suitable for artists, designers, history fans, and science enthusiasts.

_World-renowned pigment maker One of the most respected oil paint manufacturers in the world.

Adrian Rand is a commercial photographer with more than 22 years of work experience, and his photographic works have won many international photography awards.

_The history of the invention of pigments is also the history of technological progress

The book collects 180 high-definition pictures, as well as many interesting knowledge points about unpopular colors, with pictures and texts combined to provide interesting explanations. Both informative and readable.