Do you want to learn how to draw natural scenery like I do? Hi, my name is Oyun Orka, a VTuber who tries to draw, and I love drawing landscapes and natural backgrounds. So for today, let's talk about how you can draw natural scenery.

Drawing Natural Scenery

So when drawing nature scenery, something that I recommend a lot is to go out and observe the natural world, take photos and then try and learn and study from those photos to use in your backgrounds.

All photos used in the tips article and in the video are photos I took!

It's a really nice way to add a personal touch to your drawing, and also, I feel like when you see something with your own eyes, you're able to understand it better. So without further ado, let's get straight into the drawing demonstration.

So for today's drawing, I'll be primarily referencing this photo that I took for the background. However, even though I’m referencing different components of the photo, I'm not copying it exactly as I have an existing sketch and vision in mind. I personally find it's nice to first sketch freely and then search for references afterwards. That way, I don't feel as limited when brainstorming ideas.

Now that we finished the flat colors, it's time to choose colors for the backgrounds.

Choosing Colors

So when it comes to choosing colors, even for something as simple as mountains and foliage, there's a lot of ways you can approach it. Not only can you think about what plants and scenery there are, as well as the lighting direction, but also because nature is always influenced by season, I think it's also nice to discuss how seasons can affect what you're drawing.

In the spring, as plants start to grow again, everything is very bright and fresh green. In the summer, you get less of that bright fresh green, but there's still a lot of greenery. Usually in the fall, the leaves of deciduous trees turn yellow and orange and begin to fall, and by the winter, only evergreens are left.

For example, in this drawing, I wanted to feel light hearted and bright, so setting it during winter with a bunch of dying trees didn't really fit my vision. So when I first drew this piece, I envisioned a spring landscape with bright green grass.

However, you can always correct colors later. Like in this example, I ended up preferring it to be set during fall because colors complement each other better with the orange grass and blue sky. This doesn't mean you have to choose a specific season for every single nature background you draw. Often I also just ambiguously draw what I feel like.

Drawing Grass

So let's start to draw the grass. So when drawing grass, I usually like drawing long, wild grass in my illustrations. You can do this by using any hard brush with sensitivity and just making long strokes.

Also, when drawing plants or anything in nature, there tends to be a lot of color variation due to the way that the light can affect each individual blade of grass or leaf. Even on cloudy days when grass seems to be all pretty much the same color, if you color pick from any photo or image, there's a lot of slight variation. So to get that effect when drawing plants, you can either manually adjust for hue, value, and saturation every so often as you draw the foliage, or alternatively, you can download a foliage brush with color jitter.

I've also created several brushes that may be helpful in drawing natural scenery, and you can download them on the Clip Studio Assets store by using the link below!

https://assets.clip-studio.com/en-us/detail?id=2095075

So I'll go ahead and use the long grass brush, as well as the wheat grass brush from my brush pack to fill in the rest of the grass.

Drawing Trees

Now that that's done, let's move on to drawing the trees. So when drawing trees, I typically first draw the trunk and any main branches, and then use any textured brush to draw the leaves. As I'm drawing the leaves for the evergreens because I want to represent the slight curve of the needles, I just use a textured brush and then do these sorts of curved strokes repeatedly. This is because I don't want to draw every single needle individually, and each of these strokes essentially just represents a cluster of fir leaves on a twig.

Here I'm using the Zari Pen by Hmm... on Clip Studio Assets, which I've linked below!

https://assets.clip-studio.com/en-us/detail?id=1697059

Now I'll go ahead and finish drawing the rest of the tree. Using the evergreens brush for my brush pack, I'll go ahead and add in a few more trees too.

Also, depending on the distance between the viewer and the trees, trees or any object for that matter will become less clear as it’s further away from the viewer. Taking a look at this photo, you can see that you're able to more clearly make out the shape of the evergreen closer here versus the ones on the mountains further away.

Essentially, the shape is just big vertical lines indicate some trees with some texture. So let's use the distant evergreens brush from my brush pack and draw in some mountains and hills!

Mountains & Hills

So something to keep in mind when drawing distant hills and mountains is, as you draw things further in the distance, they'll take on more of the color of the atmosphere or sky around it. Here, as the mountains get further and further from the camera, it becomes more blue.

This doesn't mean that everything the background will always turn blue. It's also dependent on the light and atmosphere colors. For example, these same mountains which look blue during the day become more purple during sunset.

So keeping that in mind, I'm going to choose colors that are progressively more and more cool toned or blue, similar to the sky color, the further away the hills are from the viewer.

When it comes to drawing snowy mountains, you can use any hard textured brush or just a regular brush with pressure sensitivity.

What I like to do is block in the general mountain shape first, and then keeping in mind where the light source is, I’ll draw where I want the snow to be. Depending on the amount of snow, the steepness of the mountains, and also exposed rocks, there might be more or less snow visible. So to represent that, I try to draw strokes kind of curving alongside the slope of the mountains, and then shade and add or erase streaks from it, depending on how detailed or refined I want it to look.

While I didn't end up using a very textured brush this time, for better effect, you can try using a textured brush yourself!

Finishing Up

With that done, let's finish up the illustration. So, because I think the foreground and background blend a little bit too much into each other, I decided to set the foreground in a shadowy color here by using a multiply layer clipped above the foreground, which includes the grass and character.

This way there's some better separation between the grass near the viewer, and the hills and the mountains in the background.

Also for the character, I initially set the entire character in shadow, but because I felt like some of the details got lost, I decided to use a light orange on the same multiply layer to add a bit more light from the left side, so more of the character is lit up.

And after adding some finishing touches, we’ve finished the illustration!

For a more detailed explanation, please see my video! Thank you!