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This tutorial was written by Patrick Keith.

This step-by-step guideline is in no way the definitive process to create great landscapes with your digital software but is really an overview of one working method that has proven itself in the many pieces I have completed using it. The weapon of choice, for me, is Mac hardware running Photoshop with a Wacom graphics tablet. You can use pretty much anything you have at hand, since I will be describing painting techniques that are not really platform or software dependent. Corel/Procreate Painter is excellent software for this type of work and should be considered for serious digital painting. I was not as familiar with Painter as Photoshop at the time of creating the tutorial, so all of my examples are from Photoshop.

The commission shown in the examples was described to be a scene with Skyships, ruins and a waterfall. The rest of it I had pretty much free-reign on. It was to be printed on the outside of a Game Master’s screen for a role playing game and would be 11″x17″. I decided to do the full image at 12″x18″ to give a little extra trimming room. The image was setup in Photoshop 5 at 300 dpi in CMYK mode since the file was going to be color-separated at the printer. A lot of times there is a visible color shift converting RGB files to CMYK, so I normally work in that mode.

The original sketch was done at 4″x5″ and sent via email to the art director for approval. You can see that it is just general broad brush strokes to give the impression of the whole image. Once the approval was given for the sketch I enlarged the image to the final size of the painting to act as a guide.

For this image, I wanted to do it at least the original size it was going to be printed which is 11″ x17″. I added the extra inch to each side to give the printer a little leeway in cropping the image. Most of the time, you’ll want to work larger than the final output. Enlarging digital images tends to pixellate them so I try to work in actual size or bigger. For card art, I work at four times the final print size because it’s easier to navigate around the image

All of the painting was done using the airbrush tool in various sizes with an edge sharpness of 100% and spacing set to 1. I also set the opacity in the Brush Options between 10 and 15.

The Painting Process

Here is the background with a few sample colors of the foreground I was experimenting with. This is a photo of clouds off my royalty-free clouds disk that came with Photoshop. I could have painted this myself, but I found an image that was suitable for the piece. It saved me some time to make my deadline. Of course, I did adjust the colors and contrast from the original image to more closely match what I had in mind. I also painted in a few details to sharpen them up a bit.

The sun is on its own layer between the sky and the mountains. I filled a circular selection area with a bright yellow color, added about 24-28 pixels of Gaussian blur and set the layer blending mode to Color Dodge. This gave a nice yellow/orange glow to the corona and simulated atmospheric haze. I adjusted the opacity of the layer to about 70% so some of the background clouds would show through a little and look like they were drifting across in front. The transparency does not show up in this particular screen shot since I did that later in the process.

Here is a closer view of the background mountains. The colors were sampled from the basic sky colors using the Eyedropper tool and painted in progressive stages. After creating a new layer on top of the background, I started with the farthest mountain and painted the basic shapes. Generally, I will create a new layer and name it “Palette” and paint several brush strokes in different values that i can sample throughout the course of painting. Like a traditional palette holding physical paint, the Palette layer allows me a mixing area off the canvas where I can create several values of a color and refer back to them easily. It’s much faster than trying to keep accessing the Color Picker over and over and trying to match the same selected color from before.

Here is a closer view of the mountains. This is at 50% of the original image size. After creating a middle tone for each mountain and the foreground hills, I added darker and lighter shades of the same colors for shadowy areas and highlights. The brightest areas of the mountaintops were colors sampled with the Eyedropper very close to the sun area. The process I used to create the texture on the mountains was the same used for the cliff face in the next section and is detailed there.

The next area I decided to tackle was the cliffs and waterfall to the left. After laying in a few base colors in a random scribble to suggest texture, I began to highlight the cliffs using more of the sky colors.

Working with a small brush size, I worked up the textures in stages as I thought the light would hit them. Scribbling in a deliberate but loose manner, I tried to create rocky outcroppings leaving darker areas to suggest shadows.

When satisfied I had created enough textures in the rocks, I created another layer on top. On the Palette layer I made an exact compliment of the cliff colors to use for the waterfall. With the Eyedropper I picked colors from the cliffs, then I hit Cmd+I (Ctrl+I on PC) to invert the colors and adjusted them for hue and saturation. This gave a surreal quality to the waterfall which contrasted nicely and made it pop a bit to provide an area of interest.

I carried those same colors all the way down to create the little pool at the bottom, adding a bit more sparkle to the center directly below the sun. Water spray was added with a soft airbrush along the length and in the splash zone to add a hazy effect.

This was the original area of color that was blocked in from the smaller sketch.

I took the darkest colors and scribbled the tree patterns to suggest texture and detail. This took around 30-45 minutes working back and forth with lighter and darker colors until it suggested the forms of treetops. I worked along the top edges with a very small brush to indicate individual leaves and branches.

Then continuing with a strong highlight color, I added more details to the treetops to separate clumps of individual trees and then worked in the water section to extend the pool area and water reflections. This all took about another hour until I was satisfied the trees had enough texture to simulate thick foliage.

This process was repeated to create the cliff and ruins on the opposite side of the final picture.

Parting Comments

Hopefully this has given some insight into how simply a landscape can be achieved digitally. Even though the process takes a little longer than the thirty minutes Bob Ross paints on TV, the methods are similar. All of the color theory, composition and color value attention is exactly the same as with traditional oil or acrylic painting. The only real trick is to get the digital tools to provide some of the same effects as physical brushes. The best way to do that is to experiment and try a few different things and constantly look at other art to see what types of techniques are being used. Maybe start with a small area and then move on from there, after you are satisfied with the results.

Also, don’t be in a rush to make everything a finished masterpiece. Even the greats like Michaelangelo would many times make a small study piece before tackling a larger work. For example, if you have trouble with shrubbery, look at some pictures of shrubs and paint a few. They don’t have to be composed, or even in color. But the exercise should show you how a shrub is constructed and how to simulate it with paint, digital or otherwise.

Value studies are sometimes more useful than anything else. A great exercise is to paint your landscapes using only three or five different shades of gray. If you can effectively simulate depth, distance, scale and atmosphere using only gray tones, realistic color pieces are much easier to produce. Study photos of landscapes and then convert them to Grayscale in Photoshop and notice how the values appear in the image. Things further away are less saturated and less detailed than things which are closer to the viewer. This really came home to me when I was digitally painting the pages of our comic book that was going to be printed in black and white. I was forced to work out all of the scenes in gray values since I had such a limited palette. This also offers you a chance to work solely on technique without having to think about color.

Feel free to visit my Epilogue page or our web site at MorganKeith Studios to see more work using this technique.