To draw a mountain, you will need:
How to Draw Mountains
Painting, drawing, and art are both relaxing and creative pursuits. While there was a huge boom in colouring book sales, it quickly plummeted afterwards. That said, painting is becoming more popular.
White backgrounds with pine trees, bears, and alpine lodges are popular amongst many artists.
So why not learn how to draw them?
With coloured pencils, oil paint, or graphite, you’ll soon know how to draw a snowy mountain top!
Art supplies at the ready! In this article, we’ll be looking at painting and drawing mountains.
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How to Draw a Mountain: Pay Attention
You need to pay attention when drawing real things. Unlike creating something yourself, when you draw a mountain, you need to look at the details to ensure that you capture what makes it real.
Ideally, you want to be looking at some real mountains. It’s harder to get more realistic than the real thing. Of course, not everybody lives opposite or even near a mountain to have the time to sit down and think about them as they draw them.
Furthermore, you can also get a feel for your surroundings. You want to capture the atmosphere and ambience when you draw a landscape. In some cases, you’ll need to take some artistic licence to convey the things you can’t see. In other words, you need to convey how the mountain makes you feel and what they’re really like.
To draw well, you need to be in a comfortable place with your sketch pad and pencils. You don’t want to lug all your art supplies up the side of a mountain, after all. A couple of pencils and some paper will do the trick. You need to try and reproduce the shapes of the mountains and their proportions on paper.
If you aren’t lucky enough to live next to some beautiful mountains, you might want to find a photo of some online. You can also copy from somebody else’s work but just for practice. Using this work would be plagiarism.
Search for drawing classes online.
What Techniques Should You Use to Draw a Mountain?
Graphite, watercolours, gouache, acrylic paint, oil paints, Indian ink, mixed media, etc., there are plenty of different materials and techniques to choose from to show off your drawing skills.
For those just getting started, we recommend you use a graphite pencil. This means that you’ll be able to correct any mistakes that you make when sketching.
Of course, there are no rules when it comes to what you’d like to use to draw your mountains. On the other hand, it’s not very easy lugging oils and canvases up the side of a mountain either. Most people opt for watercolours when painting nature as you can get watercolour palettes from most art shops. You just need a few paintbrushes, your colours, and some water.
Once you’ve finished your sketch, you can always add colour to it there or take it back with you and finish it at home. Don’t worry too much about your choice at first.
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Mariana
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Wiktoria
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5 (14 reviews)
Diana
1 st lesson free!
5 (8 reviews)
Adam d
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5 (4 reviews)
Sergei
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Tian
1 st lesson free!
5 (22 reviews)
Mariana
1 st lesson free!
4.9 (16 reviews)
Maddison
1 st lesson free!
5 (4 reviews)
Alejandra
1 st lesson free!
5 (11 reviews)
Wiktoria
1 st lesson free!
5 (14 reviews)
Diana
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5 (8 reviews)
Adam d
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5 (4 reviews)
Sergei
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Tian
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How To Draw A Mountain: Easy Step By Step Guide
Step 1: To draw a mountain, start by drawing a freehand triangle on a blank paper. Keep the triangle slightly curved at the top to create the structure of a mountain.
Step 2: Add another small triangle on the left of the first mountain, as shown in the picture.
Step 3: Now draw a bigger mountain on the right side of the already drawn mountains. The beauty of nature is that nothing is perfect. Therefore, the size and shape of your mountains can be imperfect too.
Related: 17+ Famous Haiku Poems For Kids And How To Write Them
Step 4: In this step, draw mountains in the background to make it look complete.
Step 5: To complement your mountains drawing, add a sunrise to them. For drawing a sun, doodle a semicircle rising from the middle of the mountains. Follow the picture for reference.
Step 6: Now, draw a few vertical lines on the top of the semi-circle, to appear as sun rays.
Step 7: The drawing of a mountain and sunrise remains incomplete without clouds. So draw a freehand cloud on the left as presented in the picture.
Step 8: Repeat drawing a cloud on the right side of the mountain’s pencil drawing.
Related: 40 Fun And Interesting Sun Facts For Kids To Know
Step 9: In the final step, color the mountains in natural shades of brown and green, sun in yellow or orange and clouds in white and blue.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What cognitive skills do children develop by practicing mountain drawing?
Practicing mountain drawing can help children to develop several cognitive skills. When drawing a mountain, a child makes shapes, lines, and coloring, which requires hand and finger movements, thus helping improve fine motor skills. This activity also improves children’s creative skills, attention to detail, memory, and visual perception as they observe, memorize, and replicate shapes, images, colors, and textures (1).
2. How can mountain drawing help children understand spatial relationships and perspective?
Spatial thinking in children develops with age, and drawing a mountain can help children understand its concepts and relationship. When drawing a mountain, children learn the concept of space and learn how the smaller objects or drawings are farther and larger objects are nearer (2).
3. Why is it valuable for kids to learn about different types of mountains and their features through drawing?
Drawing different types of mountains can help children learn about different types of geographic features of a mountain, such as valley mountains, peaks, slopes, elevation, etc. Thus, the simple drawing activity can be used as a geography lesson, turning fun into learning.
4. Why is encouraging kids to draw mountains a way to foster their appreciation for the natural world?
To draw a mountain, children must first observe nature, their surroundings, and the scenic beauty around them. Thus, this art will allow them to interact with nature and appreciate its beauty.
Children may become really eager to know how to draw a mountain, especially when they have just seen one in real or in pictures or movies. This step-by-step tutorial shows you the easiest way to help your child in their artistic journey. Tweak the steps to create snowy mountains or one with greenery. Encourage them to try their hands on outlining and then painting, and keep practicing to improve.
Infographic: Simple Guide To Draw A Mountain For Children
Helping children to draw a mountain is one of the easiest ways to incorporate making shapes, lines, and creativity. The following infographic gives detailed instructions for children to make a perfect landscape background of mountains. So, refer to the steps below to pen down an easy yet majestic illustration of mountains on paper.
Get high-quality PDF version by clicking below.
Paint in the Base Shadows
With the linework finished you can begin to paint in some shadows on the right side of each mountain.
If you want the old-world sepia look; select your eyedropper tool and pick the paper background color. Lower the brightness, shift the hue a little more toward red and increase the saturation just a bit. The exact color I used was #b9a48e.
I am using the Rock Climber Filler brush to achieve that nice rocky texture in the shading. Otherwise, the shading can look a bit too smooth and digital.
Deepen the Shadows and Add Highlights
The next thing to do is to deepen some of the shadows to add greater depth. Use a darker shade of brown (#7c644e), particularly near the top of each mountain.
Finally, the last thing to do is paint in some highlights on the opposite side of your mountains. Use a color that is based on your paper background but lightened. In this case, the color I used was #f2eae2.
Just like the shadows, your brightest highlights should be near the top of the mountain where the light hits most directly. I tend to prefer a lighter touch with the highlights so the mountains don’t end up looking too reflective.
Mountains were one of the things that took me the longest to figure out when I began to draw maps. A big part of the problem was seeing them only as individual mountains rather than a cohesive range made up of mountains. The distinction is important! When you see them as unified and connected with the rest of the terrain then with practice your mountains will look less like they are just stuck on top of your map, but part of the landscape.
If You’re Struggling…
Anyone can learn to draw if they have the desire to do so and put in the time. I am convinced that art is 90% skill and only 10% “talent”; the good news is that skills are learned. They aren’t magically born into some people and not others. Even the most talented person still has to put in the time and acquire the skills before they become great.
So if you follow this tutorial and struggle, rest assured that I did too and I never imagined I would be doing a tutorial on this to help others. But if you put in the time and are doggedly determined to figure it out, you’ll get there, I promise.
If you found this tutorial helpful be sure to follow MapEffects on Instagram and tag me with the map you create and I may feature your work. Thank you, and I look forward to seeing your map!
