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Hello!

I'm .avi. I work as a professional game illustrator and creating comics and webtoons is my hobby.

 

This time, I’d like to walk you through the core principles of landscape painting and how to apply them in practice using Clip Studio Paint.

 

🖌️⏱ As a bonus, you’ll find free brushes and timelapse videos at the end!

 

Also, don’t miss the follow-up tutorials on Painting snow and winter landscapes and Painting sky, clouds, and weather. Both include free snow and cloud brushes!

 

 

🟪 BASIC GUIDELINES

🟧 Planes

Start by dividing your scene into three main planes:

 

🔸 Background

🔸 Middleground

🔸 Foreground

 

This helps create depth and makes painting and adjustments easier later.

🟧 Atmospheric perspective

🟨 Colors

The atmosphere affects how we see color with distance.

It is often taught that the further an object is, the less saturated or lighter it appears…

 

But I think the more correct definition would be: the farther an object is, the more its colors are blocked by the colors of the atmosphere, blending into its hue and brightness:

The atmosphere doesn’t have to be blue—it can be any color or even a gradient, depending on your scene.

It’s like a colored mist—the farther back, the more it hides the original contrast and saturation.

 

In the following two paintings, you can see how the most distant planes get more hidden in the “mist”, that is the color of the atmosphere:

An example of an atmosphere being a gradient instead of a single color:

A good starting point is to define:

 

🔸 The base color of the sky or distant background

🔸 The darkest foreground shadows

 

Everything in between will naturally adopt more of the background tone the farther it is from the viewer:

🟨 Details

Details and contrast fade with distance—just like colors do. Think of contrast being muted by the atmosphere, like in fog.

🟧 Composition

Even in a scenic landscape, guide the viewer’s eye as if telling a story. Use visual elements to build a path through the image, helping the viewer take in all your hard work.

The eye first tends to land:

 

🔸 In the center

🔸 Along the middle third

🔸 On the most prominent element

From there, guide the way using:

 

🔸 Shapes

🔸 Lines and edges

🔸 Boundaries of light and dark areas

🔸 Saturated spots

🔸 Details like direction of clouds or flying birds:

🟨 Scale indicator

Trees, rocks, and mountains can be any size—include something to give the viewer a sense of scale.

 

👉 In a comic, it’s your characters.

👉 In a stand-alone painting it’s usually a figure of a traveler watching the scenery.

👉 Man-made objects like a car or a house inherently give away the human scale even without characters present.

 

👉 Animals also work well even if nobody knows how big they are—a simple flock of birds passing in front can make a tree look enormous.

🟧 Light

🟨 Main light source, secondary, tertiary...

You can use multiple light sources (sun, moon, magic, fire, etc.), but usually one or two main lights keep things clear.

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💡 QUICK TIP! - Light rays guides 💡

On complex scenes, sketch light ray guides to help you with shading when working zoomed in:

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🟨 Color rim

Strong light sources often create a rim of color on the edges of lit areas, indicating the temperature of the light—often orange or purple, but it also depends on the mood you want to set:

🟨 Back light

Also called rim light, this creates a bright inner outline around objects, helping them stand out and adding atmosphere:

🟨 Reflected light

Light bounces off surfaces—even shadows get some light!

 

It takes on the color of the object it bounces off:

 

🔸 Sand reflects brownish light

🔸 Grass reflects greenish light

 

Use this to add color to shaded areas:

🟨 Atmospheric light in shadows

Even areas that don’t get hit by any of the light sources or reflected light get some light—shadows are gently lit by the atmosphere!

 

The atmosphere consists of particles that reflect light onto other objects, but since the scattered light is weak, any stronger source of light overwrites it, making it prominent only in shadows:

That’s where the saying “Shadows are blue” comes from! They’re not really blue on their own, but the atmosphere’s color, usually blue, illuminates them!

 

But if your atmosphere is purple or green, so will your shadows be!

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💡 QUICK TIP! Lights on separate layers 💡

Use separate light layers. This makes it easy to:

 

👉 Change the color of an object

 

How about a beach with white sand?

 

Just change the base color of the sand and the light layer that corresponds to the light reflected from it:

👉 Change time of day and lighting

 

Play around with the color and intensity of the light layers to change the scene into a sunset, or night by a campfire!

👉 Create assets in different light conditions for games, comics or animation scenes

 

👉 Flexible revisions

 

Not sure which color and light to use from the beginning?

 

This set up allows you to change anything easily, even if a client comes up saying “Oh, but I wanted the tree pink!”. (Believe it or not, things like this actually happen quite often :D )

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🟪 PRACTICAL TIPS

In this part I’ll show you how to save time while painting natural sceneries using brushes in Clip Studio Paint!

🟧 Textured brushes – ground and rocks

My favorite brushes are flat tips with various color mixing settings and textures of rocks. They are great for both concept speedpaintings and final rendering.

💡 Use Color Jitter > Randomize per stroke for natural variety:

Most of my main brushes also have blend-only duplicates for creating painterly transitions:

 

🔸 0 Amount and Density of paint

🔸 max Color stretch

🟧 Foliage and grass brushes

I have loads of brushes for different stylizations, from cartoonish to realistic, either made by myself or downloaded from Assets.

The new Smear mode in Color Mixing is amazing—it ensures full-color strokes, avoiding half-transparent brush marks.

 

Perfect for animation-ready painting (no soft, semi-transparent edges to clean up).

🟧 Ribbon brushes – tree branches and trunks

The Ribbon brush type bends the brush tip like a ribbon—great for drawing tree trunks and branches that you don’t want to all look the same.

Draw on a vector layer, then twist and tweak with the Correct Line tools for variety:

🟧 Stamp brushes and Liquify tool

Stamp-type brushes are another time-saver!

 

In this example I just drew one palm tree crown, set it as a stamp brush and filled in the background trees in one go! A little Liquify tweak makes each look unique.

For dense forests, one grayscale (for using both main and sub color) tree brush tip can draw a whole mountain range in a few strokes just with these settings:

 

🔸 Random Thickness

🔸 Color Jitter

🔸 Random Blend with sub color

🟧 Finishing

Adding finishing touches to your painting is fun on its own – with so many layer blending modes you can take your time trying to find the ones that work best for your artwork!

 

When I’m short on time, I mostly stick with:

 

🔸 Overlay / Soft light to unify colors

🔸 Multiply / Darken for darkening

🔸 Add glow / Glow dodge for spotlights

🟪 Conclusion

These are tips that work for me—but they’re not rules.

 

If your composition or color choices feel right, even if they break guidelines, go with your gut!

 

This tutorial aims to help you enjoy painting and find your own voice.

 

🎨 Have fun—that’s the most important part!

🎁 BONUS: Brushes and Videos of Recorded Paintings 🎁

For the daring who made it all the way here, bonuses!

 

🖌️ Brushes are available for free download here (and many more are being added):

⏱ Time-lapse videos of the paintings mentioned in this tutorial:

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For those who wanted to support me, I don’t have a Patreon nor I plan to get one. I’m doing this purely for the fun of sharing knowledge :)

I appreciate your messages and thoughts very much, though, thank you!

(´｡• ◡ •｡`) ♡