Mountain Painting- A Photo Study

A beautiful tranquil mountain scene- I was instantly inspired to do a painting study when I saw a photo while browsing Pinterest. The drawing in the post are my own, based on a photo linked right below.

This is Dolomite Mountains in Italy and you can see the photo here: https://mymodernmet.com/dolomites-the-most-beautiful-trek-in-the-world/. The photo is by Angelo Ferraris and I recommend check out his other photos here: https://500px.com/famigliaferraris !
The photo is so amazing, that it's all over internet, so it took me a while to find the source. I'm not sharing the photo here so you go and click the original :)

This is my first detailed digital painting in months. I got used to working with 2 monitors when I was working on the laptop. Since switching to a PC with only one monitor I haven't done almost any digital art, only pixelart. This was because I loved keeping my references on a separate monitor from my painting. Now I realize that this was just an excuse not to try, as I had no trouble yesterday painting.

When doing a study it's important to stay attentive and not paint on autopilot, because tine is precious. You can learn a lot more if you pay attention to details. Also when doing this study I decided to try out some new techniques and to make the painting somewhat stylized not hyper realistic.

First I started with a simple value pass, which means a rough layer of base colors to set the atmosphere and composition. This is a very quick step, but very important. This is because if you do details right from the start it may be very difficult to make the painting look unified and not blotchy.

After additional rough details I used a mixer brush to blend all of the colors together. The result makes everything look very blurry, but it's a great base for details. This is something new I learned from watching various tutorials. I feel that it helped me a lot and I plan to use it in the future.

The details were really fun to draw. I used short strokes to define the shapes and lighting. Moreover the final details can take as long as the all previous steps combined. However, it's good to make a work stand out in some way, whether is be details, lighting or composition.

I don't color pick colors from the reference, because guessing the right colors is fun. We often see colors differently from what they really are, because of the neighbouring colors. For example, in this painting the mountains appear to have some yelow in the light areas. However, it's mostly grays being contrasted with deep blues. Guessing the right colors gets much easier with practice.

For this study I worked on only 2 layers- the ground and the sky behind it. In general for studies I stick to minimum layers, because this is saves me a lot of time and makes the painting look unified more easily. The brush for studies also doesn't matter, often a simpler brush is better. I feel that textured brushes are nice for finishing touches.

Thank you for reading!

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