How to Paint a Mountain: An Easy Tutorial for Beginners

Ever wanted to paint a beautiful landscape of a mountain but didn’t know where to start? Are you feeling a bit intimidated about starting an art piece? Well, do not fret! Here’s an easy step-by-step tutorial on how to paint your very own mountain!

Step 1: Channel your inner girl scout and prepare your materials

So the very first step is to of course prepare what you need to paint your mountain! Make sure you have your paints, your brushes, cups filled with water (to rinse those dirty brushes when you change colours), your canvas, and some cloth to clean messes or dry your brushes. Also, make sure you wear clothes you don't mind getting paint on! If you don’t have them go ahead and run to the nearest supplies store and grab those, don’t forget to buy a drink and snack you can sip and munch on while you continue this little art project.

Step 2: Even paintings need to start with a very good foundation

When starting a painting, the beginning step will always be to start on your background! You’d always want to start on this first because it may mess up your more detailed areas when you do them later on. Start with a beautiful sunset background with the colours you usually see in the countryside with mountains. After that let your background dry for a while, then create an outline of your mountain or mountains! Remember that mountains aren't perfect triangles, they have funny edges and different patterns of peaks. Use black paint to outline your mountains and fill them in with black too.

Step 3: Draw an uneven squiggly line down the middle of each mountain

To do this, use chalk or a pencil to make a guide vertically along your mountain. Make sure that it isn’t fully straight, you can squiggle your way too as it doesn't have to be all the way perfect! 

Step 4: Paint a layer of snow on your mountain like Elsa’s!

Mix some white paint with a little bit of black to achieve a grey colour, use this now mixed up colour to draw streaks on the left side of your mountain where you parted the mountain with the line, using an angled brush, make sure that the streaks you create aren’t thick and blocky as we want this side of the mountain to look streaky because of the snow’s different distribution, and the mountain’s texture. The streaky lines create a visual of how the mountain has different curves and movements. 

For the remaining side of the mountain, mix white with the tiniest drop of blue paint to create a pastel blue colour and use the same strokes as before to show the density of the mountain. 

*This strategy can be used on a forest-type mountain too, just add a bit of white to your green paint and follow the rest of the steps above to create a shadow effect.

Step 5: Like your hair, you also have to paint highlights on the snow

For the last step, we recommend that you use white to create highlights on the mountain where you want it to look higher than the rest. This creates an illusion of high peaks and low areas on your mountain where the snow has been dispersed. Again these steps can be used for forest-type mountains, just add white paint to your main colour to make it a little bit lighter.

With these 5 easy steps, you can create almost any type of mountain that you’d like! You can even add in any little details such as trees and higher peaks if you’d like your art piece to be more detailed. 

If you like this easy tutorial, you can check out our other super easy and fun step-by-step guides on our page on how to create other masterpieces with different painting styles and techniques! We hope you had fun and we’ll see you again in our next tutorial!