Introduction

 

In this tutorial I'm going to show you how I go about drawing forests.

I hope this will be able to help you get more comfortable drawing them! :)

 

Composition

Since forests have a busy atmosphere with all the plants and trees growing around the place, it's better if you use composition as a guide to make the focus of the painting clear.

before starting a painting, try quickly sketching some ideas that come to your mind and try giving them interesting compositions.

Like the ones I just showed above, I used compositions to guide the eye of the viewer to where you want the focus of your drawing to be.

There are some guides in the clip studio assets that can help you make the process easier.

Composition will be the first thing I will figure out before drawing a forest.

Here I drew the trees and objects follow the composition line to guide the eye to the bottom right of the drawing.

 

Only then will i start detailing and adding values.

This is another painting where I used the rule of thirds composition.

At each intersections of the lines an object or character will lay there.

Values

These sketches again, show how I separated the values to have a clear scene.

You can separate the values with the foreground, midground and background.

 

The foreground will often be your character(s), Big objects (in these cases I made it a tree).

and the background will often be the sky, or a focus point in your drawing like in this case a city or castle far away.

with the help of compositions and values you can guide the viewer's eyes to the journey of character and where he's going to for example.

You also have to be mindful about the atmospheric perspective.

Atmospheric perspective is when the farther away an object is from you, the less detailed and saturated it will be.

This sketch is an example.

The father away the objects are from the foreground the less dark and colourful it will appear.

Drawing singular elements of a forest

To make your forest believable to have to draw what is naturally laying around in a forest, like

plants, flowers ,residue and even maybe animals.

Drawing grass

we will start by drawing grass/ground first.

 

first fill the area of the ground green and then paint some areas darker where some shadows will be.

 

then with a grass brush pick a third color between the dark and lighter green.

Now with your grass brush paint on the edged of the dark green.

then again with the light green, go around the darker areas to make it blended more, also change the size of your grass brush from time to time.

it's optional but you can also add some flowers and different types of plants so it looks a bit more natural.

to draw grass by yourself, start by painting green with some darker green mixed together

then in the darker areas start drawing some blades with the same color and in the lighter green areas paint some grass blades a little lighter.

after that you can use the glow dodge filter to ligthen some blades and some areas of where the light would hit

Drawing trees

First of all when drawing trees you have to know what kind of tree you're drawing.

some trees are short, some are large and some are curved.

the big mistake I used to make was drawing trees straight as a pole and expect them to look natural.

Real trees have a curve and aren't really straight (except some trees species).

You can use that advantage and start amplifying the curves of the tree to make them more lively.

You can simplify the shape of the tree into a cylinder.

trees have a very defined texture and you need to draw the texture according to the type of tree you're drawing.

As I was saying, all trees have different sizes and textures.

If you're going to draw a forest with a specific type of tree in your idea you should always look at references to make sure it's going to look natural.

You don't have to always hyper detail the trees, it depends of what artstyle you're going for.

Like in this painting were I used the lasso tool to shape my trees fast and easily.

Foliage

the foliage in a forest is what will make the forest more natural.

To draw a bush is simple.

With the lasso tool make a bush shape and fill it in dark green. Duplicate it and change its colour to a lighter green. When that's done imagine the shapes making the form of the bush and add volume to it by almost outlining the shapes with the darker green.

Then with a foliage brush add highlights with a lighter yellow-ish shade.

To draw those small trees things ( I don't know what they're called sorry), start by drawing the branches and paint the leaves a very dark green.

With foliage brush paint on top with a lighter green and some more desaturated green and finally add highlights.

lastly even though it's not foliage, rocks re easy to draw, just imagines planes and where the light will hit on those planes. You can also ass a raw rock texture material to it.

Process

Now i'm going to show you my process of paintings forest with what I showed previously and how I apply it in my paintings.

this is the after of the sketch I showed easier.

I added fog as in often do in forest paintings.

Usually I add the fog behind some trees of the foreground.

I would add my character, detail the ground and add some effects like the glow dodge to create some sunrays. Although the problem here is that the forest looks too empty and therefore doesn't feel like an actual real forest.

This also the sketch of what I showed previously.

I detailed the elements of the painting and altered the values with the Tone Curve tool.

The curve tool is very useful for fixing the value problems you encounter;

Then I added snow to make the atmosphere comfortable.

If you're adding snow in your painting don't forget that snow will stay on the surface of some objects like he log the character is sitting with.

I also added the perlin noise filter to give the painting more texture.

Here the composition is more complicated than the previous painting but here I'm clearly defining the focus point with a strong light source passing through the trees and landing in the middle of the painting.

with a tone curve I will make the values more contrasted.

I can also duplicate the painting and turn it to monochrome and only keep the white. That way I can turn the white into light yellow and then into a glow dodge layer and apply a gaussian blur on it.

And that's the result!

Let's make another painting where the composition is very straightforward.

first detail the ground and then the trees.

Then to contrast the painting more I will again use the tone curve along with a glow dodge layer to make sunrays.

When drawing a forest at night remember to use the light of the moon as an advantage to make your painting not too dark. Here the moon is clearly used as a focus point for the viewer's eye.

When you're unhappy with your values and/or colours you can use a gradient on a copy of your painting a using a blending mode on it, here I used multiply and lowered the opacity of the gradient layer?

Thanks for reading!

I hope I helped you a bit if You struggled drawing forests!

I'll see you next time and here's my instagram account if you wish to see more of my art: