Details

A useful tool for a painter to practice or advance skills is sketching. In particular, sketching small things like leaves, stones, branches and boles of trees. It isn't so much that each of these things must be drawn or painted with exactness. It is simply that it's difficult to accentuate, or deviate, unless you understand the shape being imitated. A good example is drawing or painting trees. A beginning painter will often encounter the advice to make the tree's foliage look like solid chunks of matter--balls or fluted vases or whatever and not try to draw each leaf or branch or twig. That is, suggestion is a more potent indicator of the world than tiny tiny details. Still it helps to understand structures. 

Hoff, "Study--opposite bank," iPad sketch

In "Opposite Bank," from 2019 I used an iPad and Procreate to simulate a drawing done with a soft graphite pencil. As you can see, the masses of leaves are treated as big solids, though here and there I gave in to the temptation to render leaves too. The grasses are also treated as masses and not individual stems. Knowing how this tree branches and how its smaller twigs end in the mass of leaves is a critical piece of detail  information. 

 

Hoff, "Before the Snow," wc on paper, ~5x9

The intrinsic shape of trees varies by species and type, and knowing the variations can help even when there are no leaf masses. Sometimes in late autumn through very early spring an artist is called on to make and image of leafless woods. In "Druid Hill Creek Before the Snow" (above) there are vague washes of color indicating bare branches in the far distance, against a blue-grey sky. Instead of trying to render distant branches I washed in massed color and then drew branches here and there delineated various stands of woods. Knowing the trees' intrinsic structure, a crucial detail, helped make this watercolor believeable. 

Hoff, "Across the River (plein air)," oil on panel, 9x12

In "Across the River," above, although details, again are missing in nearly every passage, this painting again demonstrates the importance of understanding them.