At least, in my humble opinion. Don’t get me wrong though, this was still challenging for me to accomplish.
How to Paint a Mountain
Below I will outline step by step how to paint a mountain in oil using a traditional wet into wet method of painting. This glacier oil painting is a view of a glacier between two peaks in the Tetons.
How to paint mountains step by step
Painting mountains is like painting anything else for me. I was trained using the traditional method and use this time tested method to develop each painting.
- I start with a wash of burnt sienna and ultramarine blue and paint thinner over the canvas. The point of this is to get rid of the WHITE canvas. It’s hard to judge colors you put down when they are sitting on a bright white canvas.
- Next I sketch in the shapes loosely. I use the same mixture of burnt sienna with a little ultramarine blue and thinner for this. Charcoal can also be used.
- Starts with darks. I paint in my shadows. Shadows can be used to strengthen the design of a painting. This is where you can look to connect some of your dark shapes for an even stronger (simpler) design base.
- Next I put down some color. Just dabs of color to make sure my relationships are working. Start with the color you know. For example in this painting I knew the sunlit snow was going to be a warm white. I put that down because I knew it was correct. Then I put the snow in shade next to it, comparing to the snow in light.
- Continue working around the painting in this manner, putting down paint strokes in different areas. The idea behind this is to avoid spending 5 hours on one small area putting in all the details, then discovering you painted that whole area too dark. Or too light. Or too warm or cool. You get the idea.
- It’s important at this point to keep scanning your entire painting. Just because I put one color down and move to the next doesn’t mean the first color was wrong. I’m continually correcting. You can see this happened below in my WIP shots.
- Continue working in this order: darks, put in a dab of the lightest light, work in mid values, then finally lights. The idea is to cover all the canvas with paint, then you can better judge the relationships between colors. Then come highlights which should be very very minimal.
- I always let my painting sit over night and then come back the next day with fresh eyes to see what needs further work. You can see below where I marked all the things I felt needed adjustment with red circles the next day.
In addition to using these steps how to paint a mountain, it’s important for me to get just enough variation in shapes and values to make the mountains look like mountains without overworking and painting with too much detail. Too much detail, and no mystery, takes the life out of a painting. This is always something I try to remember when painting.
For this reason, plein air painting suits me because there is a time limit. I can only do so much in the hour and a half I have to paint before the light changes. So I have to prioritize and paint what is important. This is an easy way to force myself to leave out detail. There just isn’t time!
My work in progress shots
In the first photo I put in the sunlit white snow because I know what color that is. Then I added the snow in shade. You can see by the third shot I had decided my snow in shade was too dark and too blue, so I lightened and neutralized it.
There was also too much contrast between the sunlit face of the mountains on the right and the shadows in the crevices of the mountain. I eventually brought those two closer together by darkening the face. Also transitions between the darks and lights are important and necessary.
The passage where the clouds meet the top of the glacier is a very delicate passage. By that I mean the values have to be just right. I lightened the value of the clouds just a tiny bit so the glacier would stand out more. I actually love these very fine value adjustments, that’s one of the things that make painting fun for me. There is always a choice, I could have lightened the clouds or darkened the glacier.
Collect References and Examples On Pinterest
While I am fortunate to live in Colorado where we have a beautiful view of the Rocky Mountains on a daily basis. That said, I’m not the best photographer and in the interest of saving time I often opt for the technique I use for most of my projects. That is to go to Pinterest and make a board of various pictures of the subject I’m seeking to make.
Obviously today we want to specifically collect pictures of mountains at night. As part of this process, I also look to collect a handful of examples of other artwork just to see how other artists have approached it. This both helps to inspire but also is a great way to ensure you’re developing yourself in a way that produces original works. Unfortunately today there weren’t a whole lot of mountain paintings under a night sky for me to collect so we just went with this photo of the Milky Way in Mount Rainier National Park by Kevin Shearer. Check out the rest of the Pinterest Mountain board! Before we get started we need to gather up our paints and supplies. I always do my best to show you my process so that you are capable of choosing any reference picture you want. So let’s discuss that a bit next.
Decide What Colors and Paint Brushes You Need
When it comes to choosing the colors for your painting it can be a challenge to know what you might need. Especially if it’s still early on in your art journey and you are not yet used to how certain colors mix with each other. To be honest, the best thing to do is just select a palette of colors that you think you will need to complete the painting then see how it goes. Sometimes you will grab colors you don’t need and in the middle of the painting may need to pull out a color you weren’t expecting you would need. This is all part of the learning process my friend. You may even find yourself trying to get a specific color but unable to reach it with the current paints you have. This is usually due to color bias which I discovered when I tried to make purple and failed! Check out what color bias is and how to make purple here! So my thought process when looking at this picture is that I’m going to need black, blue, green, purple, orange, yellow, and white. To be more specific the colors you see in the picture above are:
- Mars Black
- Prism Violet
- Primary Blue
- Light Blue Permanent
- Light Green Permanent
- Primary Yellow
- Vivid Red Orange
- Titanium White
If you’re going to be using the same reference that I am in this project then try to gather up the same colors or whatever you have in your stock that is closest.
If you are using a reference picture of your own choosing then just do your best to gather up what you have that you think you will need to get the job done.
I recently discovered it is very helpful to have your paints available on a shelf not too far from where you paint. Before I used to keep all my paints in a bin where they ultimately would get buried.
This caused me to go digging every time I wanted a particular color. Having my paints spread out on a shelf in a way that is similar to the color wheel has definitely increased my efficiency when I realize there is some other color I need to grab.
If you have the space and ability to setup a shelf for your paints then I would highly recommend doing this!
Draw Mountain Line and Start Painting In The Sky
To start with, draw a light line roughly where you want your mountains to go. This will help you to get a good placement of your horizon.
It’s a little bit difficult to see in this picture but I actually drew one and then decided I thought maybe it would look better if it were a bit lower. So I drew a second line as well.
Ultimately, I decided to stick with my original line and will be painting over the second one I drew but between the two it helped me to know where my sky ultimately is going to stop.
Obviously with the sky being our background we want to get that going first. Especially since to get the starry effect we’re going to be using the flick technique to flick some white dots onto the canvas.
Since this technique tends to cause little white dots to go everywhere we want to make sure to do that before we start painting the mountains and the reset of the landscape.
This way if and dots land in that area of the canvas they will be covered by other layers.
One of the reasons I chose this particular reference picture is the simplicity of the foreground that’s underneath the mountain range. It’s always a good practice to keep new things as simple as possible to help keep one motivated towards completing the entire project.
I think the hardest part of this painting is going to be getting some good details on the mountains so it’s nice that the foreground is basically just black.
In this first layer for the sky I’m using Mars Black and Primary Blue. Starting at the top of the 12″ x 16″ canvas and working my way day I begin to work the primary blue into the areas where I know we are going to be looking to get a bit of that bluish glow to the sky.
I found that doing using a wet on wet mixing technique on the canvas is a good way to get that blue glow starting to emerge. A wet on wet mixing technique is where you put one color onto the canvas by itself and then mix the other color you want in with the color on the canvas already.
You’re basically mixing your colors on your canvas as opposed to your palette. I find one of the benefits of taking this approach is that you can get a nice gradient or blend from one color into the other. In this case it helps soften the transition from a bluish hazy glow into a dark space background.
We will be using this same technique in the next steps too to get the green glow and some of the sunsetting lit clouds.
