Digital painting Simple  Mountains

This is an oil  painting   exercise  translated into  digital  painting .
I used  PSP 8 with a Waccom pen and tablet  but similar  effects can be gotten with a mouse and other PSP versions.  
This beginers  painting uses only two colors, a deep cool blue and white,  This exercise helps us become aware of  some basics of light and shadow and  creating an illusion of depth. First one takes a blank image and  makes a background with a blue and white  foreground background gradient .

Then add and blend some stuff to make the sky look more skylike .
Spray on some low density patches of white in a random pattern.  If you have psp8 or 9  you can set the brush variences  to apply some dark blue mixed in as well  in each  stroke. Use a smudge brush to gently blend the paint into a sky like effect with your smudge brush . 
 

When you have the sky blended  add a new raster layer amd using your dark blue draw a jagged line across your image to provide the outline for your mountains .You can  put a little white dot on the side where you want the light to be coming from  as a reminder  if you want.  Then  draw a  few lines to indicate the basic  planes of your Mountains .
 

Then you will add some lines to mark some planes of dark and light  putting more white where the light would hit and more dark on the  sides away from the light . Use the smudge brush to start blending the lines .
 
Stroke downwards to define the planes of the mountain
 

When you observe a mountain you will notice that when the sun shines directly  onto the surface  directly it will be whiter. On the sides away from the sun and Where there are crags and valleys there aredark areas or  shadows.  Sometimes light is  reflected into darker areas of the mountain. When there is distance often the atmosphere or clouds will hide or obscure part of a mountain or mountain range .
   
Continue blending and dabbing bits of white for light and dark blue for shade  on until you are satisfied with the result .

Here is a different example. This uses more than one shade of blue.
You can use the same principles for many paintings and use different colors


















Most of the mountains here have faded into the sky
and gotten bluer with distance.










pspgradients and psp8stuff   the PSP stuff page has brush and smudge presets  some of which were used for these paintings

Copyright Peggy Jentoft 2004 all rights reserved

Peggy Jentoft

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