DIY Heart Tree Painting

Upon moving this past month, I realized that we have A LOT of wall art. Most of it is paintings that I have done. In fact, we have one whole wall just dedicated to tree paintings.

One of my most recent tree paintings is a piece I like to call “heart tree.” I did it at a wine and painting event and it’s based on the above painting.

I’ve done a lot of wine and art type events and I’ve actually learned a lot that I plan to implement into my own original paintings. One is to do the background first. This may seem like an obvious tip, but sometimes it could be tempting to paint the main object first and then paint around it. If you’re working with acrylic paints however, you can water down the paint a little and paint the background first. It will dry pretty quickly and you can go ahead and then paint your main subject/object over it.

Next we started with the tree. The instructor suggested just doing brown, but I wanted to implement a bit of purple in the tree. I would say this is my next tip: don’t be afraid to mix in colors that you might not normally think of using.

We did some detailing on the heart tree next. The great thing about working with acrylic paints is that they blend with each other really well and you can also water them down as much or as little as you want to achieve almost a watercolor effect. You can see on the grass that I really watered down the green in some areas and left it darker in others.

We finished up by adding texture to the grass and making different colored heart “leaves” all over the tree. This was probably my favorite part. It was really fun to mix and match all the different colors and overlap them to make a tree-like effect.

Below is my finished DIY heart painting. I really like how it turned out. Not to be conceited, but I actually think the heart leaves turned out better on mine than on the original. But that’s the great thing about art after all, it’s all subjective.

This painting is currently on my “tree wall,” but I realized it would actually be a really great showcase piece for a Valentine’s Day display. Where would you put a heart tree painting in your home?