Hello, my name is MattyDevily, I am an artist specializing in centaurs, horses and natural landscapes in general. Today I'm going to show you my way of drawing natural landscapes for your BD/Webtoon or Illustration! I hope this helps some! ^^

Introduction to Brushes

Cloud Brush

Before we get started in earnest, here's a list of the main brushes I use to draw landscapes. It saves time, suits my style, and has lots of interesting things to do with it! The brushes are all free, or present in Clip Studio Asset

This brush is a bit pricey, but well worth it and remains a very reliable companion when it comes to drawing pretty clouds without much handling. However, if it's not in your budget, I recommend the new pack from @devinellekurtz, it's free and happens to be a golden tool

Grass, Flower and Tree Brush

For nature, I mainly use the (free) brushes from @devinellekurtz which again are used by many artists. I advise you to take a look at her brushes and her work, she also offers urban things!

Download on Gumroad

To download the brush pack, simply enter 0 (or make a donation) to validate the transaction.

More Tree

For the trees, I use some packs found for free on Deviantart and which offer nice brushes in their packs

This is a Photoshop format (.abr) that Clip Studio is capable of reading (but sometimes requires some brush adjustments, sometimes the angle or density needs to be changed to suit your preferences.)

Photo and color reference

To make things more lively, I invite you to use Pinterest to find references that will help you throughout your adventure. This could be for the color, or simply for the decor itself. And above all make everything more organic!

It's a pretty important part in my creative process, the colorful atmosphere changes depending on what I want to tell, for comics/webtoons. This is all the more important as it can serve as a change in the story!

The beginning

Now let's get down to business, I'm going to focus mainly on the simple settings, feel free if you want to see other things in the future.

Canvas

Character placement

First of all, it is important to know where your character is going to be in your composition in order to choose the angle of view, but also to pay attention to the composition. For this order, I chose a very simple composition (at the request of the client who wanted an illustration of the character for DnD).

I then defined a perspective grid to help me better define the horizon and provide a certain depth. Since I'm not very good with the ruler yet, I mainly use a 3D model and use the perspective ruler. It's not perfect, but it does the job for a small illustration like this.

Then comes the choice of the atmosphere and what I want to do as a decor. Do I want to go to a lake? A dense forest? a pretty meadow? A hiking trail or a hill overlooking the valley? This is where Pinterest is your best friend! I dig through my files to see if a color mood catches my fancy/inspires me, or just a particular landscape that I can use as a reference. For this order, the choice was to favor something quite warm, a semblance of a meadow with a small forest in the background. The image serves me above all as a color palette.

Color reference

The flat areas

Two choices are available to you, either you copy/paste the image onto your canvas (or next to it), or you use Adobe Color to create a color palette and a gradient that you can personalize! I decided to be lazy and not use it, preferring just the pipette. (I will make a tutorial specially dedicated to this).

 

And first I place the sky color on a layer.

In my reference image, I notice a little blue which I will therefore place towards the head of my character to simulate a color variation in the sky. And I place the beginning of a cloud of the same color.

Next comes the laying of the turf. I am focusing above all on a green which will be my main color. After that, I will gradually lighten the back. (I use warm colors, more green/yellow to bring out the sunset light. The further away the object is, the more light it needs to be).

I try to avoid a graphic node between the horizon and my character! I either raise my horizon or lower it to prevent it from mixing strangely with my deertaur's belly.

 

Out of habit, I tend to slightly blur the background of the horizon. Either I use a brush or I select and go into the filters to do a slight Gaussian blur. This is not really an obligatory step, but rather serves to keep the focus on the foreground and especially on the character.

 

The further away the object is, the more it should be illuminated).

If I break down the image, this is what the color palette looks like. The darker we go, the closer we get to the camera, so the more detail there will be to capture the reader's eye.

A simple example, sometimes in a photo the nuance is not so obvious to see, it just takes a little time to get the eye used to it. As we are in art, we most often try to force the line a little more. Where nature is sometimes more subtle.

Then, I will place the trees, depending on your atmosphere, they can be lighter or darker in order to stand out and/or mark the depth. As I try to stay true to my image and want to avoid that "foggy" feeling, I darken my trees, and I add a little warm color by clipping to stay consistent with my sunset.

As for my horizon, I slightly blur my trees, a few light elements in order to create a focus around my character while keeping certain shapes of my trees visible. Many tend to blur the background too much to hide the misery (We often tend to do this at the beginning of the background), the goal here will be to make it your ally to beautify your illustration!

Here you see that everything is not blurry. Above all, avoid drawing the background by zooming in too much on your canvas and avoid giving it too much detail, this would unnecessarily load your background and have the opposite effect of what you want to evoke!

The texture

The fun part begins, and it’s also the hardest part for me to explain. As you can see in the gif below, it's a bit of a panic, and to be honest, I'm doing a lot of feeling by trying not to zoom in too much on my canvas (It's difficult, so bear with me yourself!).

Above all, I keep in mind that the further I go, the less details I need. I favor less detailed brushes which will allow me to continue sculpting the background.

The details !

Then comes the time for details, I play between the light and dark colors already present in my drawing, in order to diversify and above all make everything natural. Because in nature, not all blades of grass have the same color. Not to mention exposure to light, which will change everything.

 

It's time for you to do some tests, and discover the variety of brushes offered with the packs from @devinellekurtz. Experimentation will help you get the hang of it, but be careful not to overcrowd the canvas and to keep a certain perspective on your work. So we avoid zooming in too much! The goal is to see the work as a whole and not in detail.

We then add a small flower to create color and make the field more lively or flowery.

 

As before, I slightly blur the one in the background with my brush, in order to keep the focus in the foreground. I keep in mind that the further back I go, the less detailed my flower should be!

And add some details to make everything more lively. I add a few bushes that I blur to stay focused on the character.

I add some color to the sky to make the sunset more sparkly, and I finish with inking and coloring my character!

Finished !

Your illustration is now complete!

Bonus

Thank you for following this tutorial! This is a first so I wanted to detail it as much as possible. It's not always easy to find one and I've often had to get angry at a stage that the person goes through too quickly! This is sometimes more obvious to see on video than on a simple screen.

 

If you're interested in other similar tutorials, I'm up for the challenge! Let me know in the comments if this helps you or if you're stuck on a step so I can explain it a little more. I would be delighted to have suggestions for future tutorials, whether on horses, centaurs or decoration!