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Fantasy Landscape Tutorial with Mountains

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Brilee

Introduction

Hello! I am a Clip Studio Paint Pro user and my name is Brilee! I will be showing you all how I created my Fantasy Landscape piece!

Making a Document

Once I open Clip Studio Paint Pro, I make an illustration file with the dimensions of 3800 X 2500 pixels and 300 dpi

Before We start, Let's take a look at the basics of Composition

The Foreground, Middle Ground, and Background of a piece are all apart of its composition. As you may think, Foreground is what is closest to you, middle ground is a little farther away, and the background is FARTHEST away from the viewer. Objects in the Foreground of many pieces can be darker than objects in the middle and background. Objects in the Background can be seen as lighter in hue. I will be working with this mindset throughout my journey.

Making a Gradient for the Sky

I will be using the "Blue Sky" gradient tool to make a smooth looking sky in my background. This saves a lot of time for me.

Experimenting BEGINS!!

Alright! this doesn't look too bad. I am using the "Thin Gouache Brush" in most of this piece because I like to form nice opaque shapes. In the foreground I want something dark in hue to be in the way of the view of the background. In the middle ground, I want some land area with some grass. Finally, for the background, I want some Mountains!!. Although this is the very beginning of the piece, it is also very important because this is when we first discover what we want! Don't worry if it looks terrible. This is the experimentation process where we place objects and colors on our canvas to plan our composition.

I Now Have A Basic Idea of what I want

After experimenting with lighting and where I want my light source to be which is on the top right over the mountains, I added tints and shadows of blues over my mountain and tints and shadows of blue and green to the grass area in the middle and foreground. I also added a tiny red headed subject to my piece so that the viewer has more information as to how big these mountains really are!

AND ! I added a big red tree growing on the side of the mountain to add another pop of color and to add a surreal fantasy aspect to my piece.

Now It's Time to Bite into the Meat of the Piece

I don't like the stiffness of the tree and I want to make it feel more organic. Oh! An easy way to do this is to use the Mesh Transformation tool that can be found when you click >Edit >Transform > Mesh Transformation. The item you want to warp has to be selected with a selection tool on the correct layer !

There ! After I move the points to where I desire, I am quite happy with how this tree will soon look!

Alright! Let's Add Details to the Mountain !

I want to add a base color to these mountains and only these mountains. I don't want my brush to touch anything else on the canvas. So! I want to use the Lasso Selection tool !!

This time, I want to custom make my own gradient to match the specific blue lighting that I want my mountain to have. I click on the Foreground to Background color setting on the gradient tool and set my colors from a light blue to a darker blue.

I am using the Thin Gouache Brush to add the snow and dents of the mountains. Very tedious.

And I am working my way down the mountain!

Working on the Foreground and More!

In the Foreground, I added a larger amount of grass and as the grass gets closer to the viewer, I wanted it to get larger and darker so that it gives the illusion that the viewer is looking in at an extreme angle. I also gave more detail to the roots of the tree. I also changed the canvas size to 3800 X 2160 pixels 300 dpi.

Clouds! and Birds!

In the background, I wanted the clouds to lead the viewers eyes in the direction towards the peaks of the mountains and further into the great distance !!

I wanted to add some white birds as well ! With the G-pen tool I paint the silhouettes of birds in the distance