Hand Drawing Tutorial: How to Draw Mountains

By Gasper Habjanic on July 28, 2014 No Comments / 8339 views

In this week’s tutorial we’ll look at how to draw mountains. Their interesting rock formations make mountains one of my favorite landscape types to draw. I also find their shapes and patterns a great source of inspiration for design.

I usually start the process by drawing the shapes of the peaks. At the same time I also start adding texture to the drawing. Mountains comprise many lines and shapes in form of cracks and rock layers. Try to draw as many of those as you can to better describe the shape of the mountain massif. In general, the lines run more vertical if the surface is steeper and more horizontal if it’s more flat.

Since we want to analyze and understand the shape of the mountain landscape, we can try adding shade on the mountains. There are always dark areas on a mountain and drawing them emphasizes the form. It also makes the drawing look more three dimensional.

At a certain altitude the bare rock stops and the forests begin. There I stop adding texture and draw the outline of the hills in front of the mountains. To create depth in the drawing I add value – I color the closer hills darker and the hills further away lighter.

I hope you share some of my enthusiasm for drawing mountains and will try out the techniques I have presented here!

You can also follow Linescapes on Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook!