Easy Folk Art Tree

Create new layer (TREE)

Create a new layer for tree by clicking the layer icon on your layer palette and selecting new raster layer. Name each layer as you go. It's a good habit to get into!

Select a brown for stroke/foreground color. This will be the 'tree trunk' color.

Using the Line/Draw tool, draw a straight line for the trunk.
Select these settings in the Tool Options box:
Solid, single Line, size 14, anti alias ON, vector OFF
Hold the shift key down as your draw your line to get a perfectly straight line.

Change the Line/Draw tool to freehand line, size 5 and loosely draw some branches. Think of the branches as looking like the veins on a leaf. Some will branch out from the main trunk and some will branch from other branches! As you can see in the screenshot above, it is not necessary to be real accurate. Any lines that don't connect....we'll just cover with leaves!! ;-)

Create a new layer (LEAVES)

On a new layer, use the Tube brush and the leaf tube made in the Easy Leaf Tube tutorial (or another leaf tube), to paint (stamp) a bunch of leaves on the branches. It may be necessary to change scale of leaf tube (in Tool Options box) to suit the size of your trunk.

Start by 'stamping' a bunch of leaves around the top branches by clicking and moving your mouse around in a half circle above the branches. You can always UNDO if you get too many!! Then start filling in the area with more leaves, overlapping the branches here and there and where the branches meet the trunk.

Don't forget to leave some holes for the birds to fly through!!!

Paint Shop Pro 7 comes with a "lawn" tube. Use the lawn tube to place some grass at the bottom of your tree as I did for the tree at beginning of tutorial. You will probably have to change the scale of the grass tube to a smaller size. If you don't have the grass tube, just draw some green lines to represent grass as I did for the tree shown below. You can get additional tubes for free at Corel.

It looks nice to also add some leafy shadows under the tree. I scribbled some shadows on a separate layer with the Paintbrush tool (using black) and adjusted the opacity until it looked like a shadow. For the tree below, I also added some highlights and shadows to the tree trunk.

Save & Optimize

Merge all layers (layers > merge all) and export as gif (file > export > GIF optimizer).

In the GIF Optimizer dialog box, you can preview the image as you select transparency, method of color reduction and other format options from each of the tabbed pages. If you're unfamiliar with these choices, you can click the "Use Wizard" button and let PSP guide you through the optimization process.

To see how the different methods of color reduction effect the colors in your image, zoom in on the preview box and compare the 2 images very closely. The one on the left is your original...the one on the right is optimized. Some optimization choices will create an uneven, undesirable, colorization. If this happens, adjust the settings on each tab until you reach the best compromise between image quality and optimized file size. View the "Download Times" tab to estimate the speed with which your file will display on web.

Either the GIF, JPEG, or PNG Optimizer should be used for EVERY image you save for use on the web (or email). When I'm in doubt about which file format I should use, I'll audition my image in each Optimizer to see which file format gives me the best combination of quality with the smallest file size.

Try making some more trees that are shaped a little different or have different leaves. You could also create a new leaf tube in warm colors to make a tree with Autumn leaves. How about making a tube with leaves and apples...for an Apple Tree!!