Creating a Stylized Landscape Using Procreate

Hi! Today I will be teaching you some basic techniques to make simple but beautiful painted landscapes using Procreate for IPad. While this tutorial will specifically use Procreate, most digital art programs will have a similar set of tools to this one. Throughout these steps, you will notice that I put a great deal of effort into explaining alternative options that will work with other programs. This will allow you to apply this knowledge to any drawing program of your choosing!

1. IPad with Apple Pencil
2. Procreate App

While the sketch may look detailed, making a sketch like this is simpler than you may expect. It's best to create a sketch with any one of the sketching brushes since they are not too opaque and they don't look out of place with lines that are not smooth. If you take the pencil and draw a circle, holding the tip of the pencil in place at the end of the stroke, the program will automatically make a smooth curve. This can be done to create straight lines as well. Doing this should help with making a sun. For the rest, clouds and landscape can be randomly placed in the frame. Trees can be a bit more tricky, but will generally look good as long as the branches are mostly straight and decrease in size the further away from the trunk they get.

Tapping on the two boxes in the top right as shown will open up the layers menu. From there, you can tap the layer with two fingers and an opacity bar should show up. Turn down the opacity to a place where you can see the sketch but only very lightly by dragging left on the screen. Then tap on the screen and select "apply." Doing this will make it so your sketch layer is visible but not distracting.

Note: Keep your sketch layer as the top layer, and do not draw anything else on it! This layer's visibility will be turned off later into this tutorial. This can be done by unchecking the box next to the layer in the layers menu.

First, create a new layer under the sketch layer. Then, using the watercolor brush under the painting category, brush in a purple color for the sky or any other color you may prefer. It does not matter if the sky is contained within your sketch lines as you will be painting over these layers (In fact, painting a little over is preferred).

Note: In general, there are two main ways to paint digital art. You can draw certain foreground objects first to save time on the background, or you can paint the background first and possibly lose some background detail when adding foreground objects over top. Painting the background first is usually a safer option. When you paint clouds, a common mistake is accidentally working around foreground objects. This looks unnatural as background objects do not conform to foreground objects. Painting the background first eliminates this possibility.

After painting the base coat for the sky, scribble in some rough clouds in random locations using the watercolor brush. These do not need to be carefully painted at all as we will be refining the shape shortly. You can usually use blues, yellows, oranges, reds, or shades of pink and purple for skies.

With Procreate, there is a brush in the painting category called "Turpentine." Using this brush, you can paint using circular motions with a selected color and it will blend that color and the colors on the layer to create wispy looking clouds.

Alternative Options: If you use a program without this specific brush, try experimenting with a few different brushes to find a similar type, or see if there is a cloud brush. Procreate has a cloud brush under the elements category, but it didn't fit the style quite as much in this case. The rainforest brush under the organic category is also a useful alternative in Procreate.

Find the lightpen brush in the luminance category. Then, create a new layer above the sky layer. The shape of the clouds in this example looked best with the top right of the sun covered, but your painting may vary.

Alternative Options: Another method which works on almost all drawing programs is to create a circle with a selection tool, fill the circle with white, copy and paste for a duplicated layer, and then use gaussian blur on the duplicated later. Gaussian blur blurs the layer radially. Another solution is to use feathering on the selection if your program has that feature.

After the previous step, you may have noticed that the sun seemed out of place. To correct that, add a yellow or orange gradient to match the clouds nearby. This is done using clipping layers. First, create a layer right above the sun layer. To create a clipping mask, tap on this new layer and select "clipping mask." Drawing on a clipping layer only allows you to draw over the layer underneath. If portions of the underneath layer are transparent, you cannot draw over them. Use a large soft airbrush on the clipping layer to add a color tint on the sun.

Alternative Options: Another solution is to use a gradient tool if the program you use has one. On most computer programs, these work by clicking and holding from one position to another with your mouse. The tool then creates a gradient from your primary selected color to your secondary.

Create a new layer beneath the sun but above the sky. On this layer, use the soft airbrush to add light blue to the bottom of the sky, light yellow to the clouds around the sun, and orange/red on the clouds behind the sun. The purpose of doing this is to add depth to the sky and to smooth out the jagged clouds by partially concealing them with a light opacity brush.

Since you can now see the finished sky, you may see some things worth improving. In this case, smaller trailing edges were added to the clouds on the original sky layer to add more detail to the sky. This was done using the same technique as step 5 but with a smaller brush. Changing the brush size can be done with the top left bar.

Add a new base layer to paint completely opaque trees and landscape. Splitting up the trees and ground into different layers can alleviate some difficulty with upcoming steps. It is very important that these are opaque as you will be using clipping layers in the later steps. The type of brush is not very important for this step as long as the brush does not leave gaps and is not transparent. Most of the brushes in the inking category will work well for this.

To add texture, create a clipping layer above the tree layer and brush up and down along the length of the trees. This can be done with darker and lighter browns/oranges using the wet acrylic brush in the painting category.

Using another clipping layer above the first and the soft airbrush, add dark blue in the direction opposite to the sun and light yellow in the direction towards the sun. You can use black and white for shading, but using color to emphasize the warm and cool areas tends to give the piece more emotion by adding vibrancy. The reason this is done on another clipping layer is so that you can adjust the opacity of this layer to make it look just right after finishing.

This is one of the most complicated looking steps, but it is actually far easier than it may appear. First, use a regular layer on this part above all of the other layers. A clipping layer is not used because grass tends to be rough, so you want the edges of the grass to be rough with some of the blades of grass sticking up. Afterword, you can erase the extra portions since this is on a different layer. Using the dry brush in the painting category, stroke left and right rapidly to add different shades of green, brown, yellow, and blue while prioritizing keeping most of the yellow towards the center and the blue towards the edges. After building up enough color to cover the base layer, your result should resemble grass.

Alternative Options: If you have another program, check if it has a grass brush by default. If not, you can find a brush which appears more patchy and see if it creates strands of color when painting with it. If it does not, see if you can edit the brush to decrease the brush density if that is an option.

The last and final step is to use a soft airbrush to add a shadow to each tree. Create a shadow which moves outward away from the sun with a dark blue on a layer above the others, then change the opacity to be lighter until it appears natural to you. If you have not already, toggle the visibility for the sketch layer. Step two explains this in more depth.

And you have now finished your painting! The final layout of the layers should be a similar order to what is shown. If this is not the case, you may have done things slightly differently which is completely fine! This should just serve as a reference for you.

Some ways to improve upon this would be adding more small details to the clouds, using different brushes to add variety to the grass, adding highlights to the bark, or adding more into the scene. Whatever you decide to do, art is not necessarily a step by step process. If you think something looks off or could be improved, go back to that portion and make as many edits as you wish!