Two things decide whether a lemon tree painting works: whether the greens vary, and whether the lemons are painted as forms rather than as the color yellow. Get those right and the rest is arrangement.
An honest note first: we do not make a lemon or citrus design. The only fruit still life in our catalog is Apple Harvest. What follows is how to paint one yourself.
What you need
Six colors and white will do it, but for this subject three additions earn their place: a yellow ochre, a burnt sienna and a phthalo or sap green. You will still mix rather than use them straight.
Brushes: a medium flat for the background, a filbert for the leaf masses, a small round for individual leaves and fruit, and a liner for stems and the fine branch work. A fan brush is optional and easy to overuse — it produces a very recognizable texture that reads as a shortcut when it appears too often.
1. Background before anything grows in front of it
Lay the whole background in first, wall to wall, and let it dry. A warm off-white, a pale terracotta or a soft sky all work. Painting the background around finished foliage is slow and it never looks as clean.
Keep it lighter than you think. The leaves will be dark, and the tree only reads against a background it can stand out from.
2. Mix the greens, do not pour them
The single most common failure in painting foliage is using one green from a tube for the whole tree. Real leaves vary enormously, and a flat tree reads as wallpaper.
Mix your greens from a yellow and a blue and change the ratio as you go:
- Sunlit leaves: more yellow, and a touch of white. Warm and light.
- Mid-tone leaves: the balanced mix. Most of the tree lives here.
- Shadowed leaves: more blue, plus a small amount of red to knock the saturation down. Not black — black kills a green completely.
Why the red works is the simplest piece of color theory there is, and it is explained on the color wheel: red sits opposite green, so a touch of it desaturates without graying.
3. Foliage as masses, then leaves
Block in the whole canopy as two or three large shapes in the mid-tone. Then add the shadow mass underneath and the lit mass on top. Only after those three read as a rounded form should you paint any individual leaf.
Then paint perhaps a dozen actual leaves, at the edges of the canopy and where the light catches. Not two hundred. The eye fills in the rest, and a tree with every leaf painted looks worse than one with twelve.
4. Lemons are not yellow
The most useful sentence on this page. A lemon in daylight has at least four things happening on it:
- A bright, slightly warm yellow on the lit side.
- A mid yellow across the body.
- A shadow side that is not darker yellow but a warm olive or ochre, because the shadow takes on the green around it.
- A cool bounce of reflected light on the underside, coming back up off whatever is below.
Paint those four bands and blend the edges lightly while they are open, and the lemon becomes round. Paint the whole thing one yellow with a dark crescent and it stays a flat disc.
Two more details. Lemon peel is pitted, not smooth — a very light stipple with a nearly dry brush over the mid-tone gives you that without overdoing it. And the highlight is not pure white; on a matte surface like citrus peel it is a soft, slightly warm light patch, not a hard dot.
5. Stems, branches and the finish
Use the liner brush and paint branches with a single confident stroke each rather than several nervous ones. Branches taper as they go out and change direction at each junction. A branch of even width along its length looks like wire.
Every lemon needs a small stem and a hint of the calyx where it joins, and the fruit should hang from below the branch rather than sit on top of it. Small thing, and it is the detail that gives away a painting done without a reference.
Let each layer dry properly before adding the next, which matters more with acrylic than any other medium — the reasoning is in our guide to layering acrylic paint, and the brush shapes above are covered in more detail in our guide to brushes for acrylic painting.
If you would rather not do the drawing
Apple Harvest is the fruit still life we do make: bushel baskets of apples with a white bowl and leaves, warm throughout and one of the more approachable designs to work through. The florals and the rest of the catalog are in one collection.
