Photoshop Tutorial- Simple Mountains

Here is a very simple, yet effective way to illustrate mountains in Adobe® Photoshop®.

First, open Photoshop... got it? Okay, here we go!

Create a new document with a white background at whatever width and height you want. Just make sure it's big enough so that you can explore the canvas.

Now, set your foreground and background colors to a color and a darker shade of that color repectively. This will be the main color of the mountains. I chose a brown and a darker brown.

Create a New Layer (Shift + Ctrl+ N) and select the Gradient Tool (G)

Using Linear Gradient, simply fill the layer with a smooth gradient of the two colors you chose earlier.

Now we need to start to sculpt the mountain. Grab a soft brush and a darker brown color and lighly shape the shadows of the mountain. If necessary, grab a white brush to draw out where the light is coming from to help guide you where the shadows should be.

Now grab a little bit light brown and block in the rest of the mountain.

And now grab a white brush to start blocking in the snow/highlights.

Now, the fun part. Grab the Smudge Tool (F) and select a rough and dotty brush. I chose a chalk brush.

Start to smudge the snow down and mountain peaks together. You may have to develop a feel for this but once you get the hang of it, it should be pretty simple.

With a little bit more editing and added highlights:

Here, I just brought the mountain base down to the end of the canvas so it doesn't look like the mountain is floating in space.

On a new layer, grab a large soft brush and select the color you want the sky to be. Just lightly, run the brush over the sky above the mountain:

Add some clouds. There are many tequniques for this. I just chose a soft white brush and scibbled around.

That's it! A very quick way to draw some mountains!

Now, the mountains in my example are very simple. If you would like to add more detail to them, this is possible by zooming in and adding more textures/shadows and highlights.

By the way, some ways to put the mountains in use are for image backgrounds, art, and webpage headers...

I hope you learned something or were inspired in some way by this tutorial.

For more tutorials like this one, visit http://cornoncob.com