Procreate: How to Draw Landscapes Digitally - Distant Falls 💧

Welcome. In this tutorial, I'm going to share some of the techniques I used to create this landscape painting in Procreate. This painting was created entirely with my Nature brush pack for Procreate. When starting any complex scene, it's incredibly useful to separate your major visual planes like the foreground, middle ground, and background into different layers. This allows you to block in large, simple shapes quickly. This foundational step is crucial because it keeps your work organized, lets you make non-destructive edits later, and helps you establish the overall composition and color palette efficiently. A fundamental technique for creating a sense of distance and perspective is simply making background objects smaller. The concept of atmospheric perspective also comes into play here. Objects that are further away should not only be smaller, but also have lower contrast and appear slightly desaturated or cooler in color. This visual diminishing is key to making your scene feel vast and deep. Once you have the shapes blocked in, you can add detail without fear of painting outside the lines by utilizing the Alpha Lock feature on each layer. This allows you to confine your brush strokes strictly to the painted pixels. It's a quick and easy way to fill a predefined shape, like a distant forest or rock face, with texture, color, variation, and fine details. Another powerful method for precise painting is using selections. By making a selection around a specific area, you're confining your brushes to that exact boundary. In this case, the shape of the brush is too wild, so I can tame the edges by using a selection. I still get that nice texture inside the selection. If you've applied a color to the canvas and it isn't quite right, don't immediately erase it. Instead, experiment with different blend modes. Blending modes allow the color of two layers to interact in various ways. Once you find a mode that works, you can fine-tune the effect by reducing the layer's opacity, which helps the new color subtly merge with the colors beneath it. For adding detail to elements like this dense plane of trees, I sometimes use a subtractive method. Here you can see I used an eraser to cut away at the base of the trees, essentially creating negative space by revealing the ground layer beneath. After that, I switched to a blending tool and softly smudged out the base of the plane, which naturally creates shadows on the ground and helps anchor the trees in the scene. Building on that idea, I'm using the blender tool not just to soften, but to actively push away pixels beneath the canopy of trees. By working upward with a small blender brush, I can carve out gaps that suggest individual tree trunks. This is a subtle but highly effective way to imply structure without actually painting every trunk. Painting realistic waterfalls is surprisingly easy, provided you have the right brush. The one I'm using is fantastic because it's set up to build color from a dark blue base to a bright white highlight. Most importantly, it's a flat brush that can be rotated, which allows me to make very dynamic sweeping strokes that naturally convey the speed and motion of the falling water. Placement is key for making the waterfall look integrated into the environment. I'm making sure to position them strategically by locating them over existing shadows or dark patches in the cliff face. This step is important because it makes the water appear to flow from a source that's recessed into the rock, enhancing the feeling of depth and realism. To finish off the trees and foliage, adding fine details like thin trunks and delicate branches with a small brush is essential. Here's a pro tip. After painting them, use an eraser or a layer mask to selectively remove small areas of the branches. This technique makes it look as though they are partially obscured or covered by dense leaves, giving a natural layered feel to the canopy. Adding numerous small features such as bushes and shrubs is a great way to add visual interest and texture to the ground plane. However, you absolutely do not need to labor over drawing each bush individually. Instead, use a texture brush that is designed to scatter random shapes. By letting the brush do the work, you achieve a more organic and natural looking result than you would by painstakingly drawing them one by one. Sometimes texture brushes are designed to build up or even slightly change color as you apply them. This can make it challenging to lay down the exact color you intended. As a workaround, you can again utilize blend modes and then immediately reduce the layer opacity. This allows you to introduce the desired color and texture subtly, blending it in naturally with the underlying paint. Here's a tip for painting realistic clouds. You need to consciously avoid overblending. You want to maintain a healthy balance between sharp defined edges and soft atmospheric transitions within the cloud shapes. To restore sharpness, try blending from the background color in toward the cloud shapes. Furthermore, adding contrast is essential. For instance, if I allow some light to subtly spill out from below a dark heavy cloud, it dramatically enhances the effect, making it truly look like the cloud is blocking the light in the sky. To convey a sense of movement and flow across the landscape, especially when defining slopes or fields, using a flat brush that can be easily rotated is highly effective. The direction of your brush strokes naturally guides the viewer's eye and suggests the lay of the land. As always, if the application feels too heavy, I can use blend modes to mix the color in naturally with the existing terrain. My final and perhaps most crucial tip is to regularly flip your canvas horizontally. Flipping the view immediately helps you spot mistakes that your brain has naturally filtered out from looking at the same view for too long. Sometimes you might even find you prefer the flipped version, as it gives the entire painting a fresh, unbiased look. That brings us to the end of this Procreate landscape tutorial. I hope you found these tips helpful for your own digital painting process. If you want to paint along with me stroke for stroke, you can watch the raw 2-hour real-time version of this painting by becoming a member. There's a link to that in the video description.