With a paper towel, lift off some of the green pigment.
Simple Watercolor Mountain Tutorial for Beginners
In this post, you’ll learn three watercolor mountain tutorials using a variety of watercolor techniques. This is the perfect beginner exercise to practice and improve your painting skills!
Watercolor mountains can be challenging, however, once you get the basic idea they can be a lot of fun to paint. Although you can create many types of mountains, I decided to include three step-by-step tutorials to help you!
Let’s get started…
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Mountains in the distance
There are two important factors when it comes to painting mountains in the distance:
1. The farther away the mountains are the lighter they should be. In the exercise below, you can see how I’ve painted the mountain farthest away the same color as the sky.
2. The closer the mountains are in perspective, the more detailed they tend to be.
Colors used:
1. Light Gray: Cobalt blue + Burnt Sienna + Rose madder (small touch)
2. Dark Gray: Paynes gray + Prussian blue
3. Mountains: Prussian blue + Cadmium yellow
4. Dark Green: Prussian blue + Cadmium Yellow + Paynes Gray (small touch)
5. Closer mountains: Yellow Ochre
Step by step tutorial
Start by wetting the sky area with clean water and then paint in uneven strokes of dark gray. Paint the sky darker at the top and lighter towards the horizon.
Let the sky dry, then paint the first layer of the farthest mountain. I used the same gray mixture as the sky, however, more saturated.
Now it’s time to paint the next mountains, here I’m using blue-green by adding a touch of Cadmium Yellow to Prussian blue. Always make sure the previous layers are dry before adding the next layer.
As you paint the closer mountains, adjust the mixture by gradually adding small amounts of yellow.
Paint the closer mountains with a little more texture. Do this by painting a few lines with white spaces between.
Add more yellow to the mixture and paint in the white areas:
For the second closest mountain I started with some yellow ochre (you can mute it or use a different color). However, I didn’t mix it with another color to keep the tutorial simple.
Start by painting some strokes across the mountain and leave some white areas.
With a light green mixture, paint into the yellow ochre using the wet-on-wet technique. Next, adjust your mixture by adding more blue and painting a few lines across the hill as shown in the image below.
After the first mountain dries, finish off with the final one by painting in yellow ochre, this time I covered the whole area.
Add some medium green to the wet paint without covering up the yellow ochre underneath.
Finally, after the paper has dried, you can go in with a smaller brush and add some details and texture using the dry brush technique.
Snow Capped Mountain
Key tips:
1. Preserve the white of the paper.
2. Always start with the lighter values and work towards adding the darker colors.
3. Try to make the direction of the brushstrokes match the flow of the mountain.
Colors Used
1. Light Gray: Cobalt blue + Burnt Sienna + Rose madder (a touch)
2. Dark Gray: Alizarin Crimson + Prussian blue + a touch of lemon yellow
3. Blue: Cobalt blue + small touch of Rose madder
How to paint snowy mountains
You’ll have to work quickly on the sky so make sure to mix your colors beforehand.
To paint the clouds, wet the sky with clean water and start painting in strokes of light gray. Leave some areas white (to add blue later).
While the paint is still wet, drop in a slightly thicker consistency, (not too thick), of dark gray into the middle of the light gray clouds. Don’t completely cover the areas underneath.
Clean your brush and paint in some cobalt blue mixed with a touch of rose madder into those white areas. Let it dry…
Once the sky has dried, start painting in the shadow areas with a light gray.
Drop some dark gray spots into the light gray while the paper is still wet. Notice how the edges are softer and lighter in value? You can do this by dampening the brush and lifting some of the pigment.
With the dry brush technique, pick up some light gray and paint a few textured brush strokes across the mountain. Try to paint the brushstrokes in the direction of the mountain, then let it dry.
Once the underlayer is dried, paint over the textured strokes with light gray. Don’t cover the whole area, or it’ll look flat. (leave some white spots)
You can see in the picture below how I painted the lighter half of the mountain, with a few short and thick strokes of light gray.
You can use a paper towel to lift some of the paint to include lighter areas. If the paint has dried, simply rewet the area you want to lift off, then dab it with a paper towel.
Add a few darker lines on the lighter side of the mountain.
Let the paper dry again, then add more dry brush strokes on top like so:
Finish off by darkening some of the shadow areas with a dark gray mixture. You can also use the dry brush technique for more texture.
Life Inside of a Snowy Mountain Painting
Sometimes a memory is too pure to be captured accurately by a camera, and it all comes down to what’s going on in the background.
Feb 10, 2022
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Life Inside of a Snowy Mountain Painting
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“Watch the bar,” the liftie 1 warns. He steadies the ancient two-seater chair as it swings around on its cable. I grab the center pole that supports the seat — a now-obsolete fixture, absent from modern chair lifts — as I’m hoisted off the loading platform and into the air.
There’s no safety bar, no place to rest my snowboard. The whole thing shakes from side to side, but somehow it all feels right.
The snow is coming down pretty hard, accumulating on my jacket and lap faster than I can brush it off.
From my perch, I smell freshly baked sugar waffles, drizzled with chocolate, wafting up from the tiny shack near the bottom of the slope.
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I take my next run with food on my mind, meandering through the deep powder piling up in the dell. As I emerge from the trees, I reach down to start unstrapping my bindings, still coasting to a stop by the waffle cabin.
I pay for the treat, brush the snow from a plastic Adirondack chair, plunk myself down, and take in the scene.
I always wanted to look back on that moment — but in a way the precision of a camera couldn’t capture. I set about trying to recreate that day on a canvas.
The next morning, I gathered my supplies, set up my easel, and started mixing paints. It was all soft blues and grays at first. I used an enormous brush to shape the vague outline of the hillside, fading into the distance across the canvas.
When the underpainting 2 dried, I set to work painting in the pines. Like many art techniques, I learned this one from watching old tutorials from Bob Ross. I dotted the farthest reaches of the hillside with “happy little trees.”
I created with variety. Some were full of needles. Others stood crooked with sparse branches. I added in others that had been struck by lightning, stripped of all their boughs and killed where they stood; tall, thin lines standing stark on the hillside.
None were bigger than the nail of my pinkie.
I admired this distant hill with pride, before covering the entire canvas again in a coat of diluted, storm cloud paint.
Endless Coats of Gray
During that afternoon snowstorm, nothing stood out clearly. The air was thick with flakes and low clouds.
In my painting, I mimic that affect with layering. The closer you get to the foreground, the sharper the details become. The farther away, the more coats of thin gray paint the details hide beneath.
When I’m done with all the trees, I realize I’m left with a boring, wide-open hillside in the front left corner. In reality, the space was a wide-open trail, where riders raced down to the waffle hut where I’d been sitting when I took the picture.
But this wasn’t reality. It was a world of my own creation.
Using my pallet knife and a few flicks of the wrist, I built my dream home: a snow-covered A-frame cabin.
With a dollop of neon green, and two tiny brushstrokes, I materialize a brand-new pair of skis, sticking out of the snow.
Another few blots of white, and footsteps march their way up the stairs, tracking snow up the stairs and across the porch to the front door.
I weighed down the arms of the largest pines with clumps of snow, then spatted flecks of white across the scene to re-create the flakes that first captivated me on my trip.
The end result now hangs above my bed.
A Closer Look
The day I wrote this, I got out of bed and spent a few minutes gazing at the bespoke mountainside. This is the tiny detail that inspired me to share this story with you:
Can you even see it? Those tiny trees on the farthest hill? I remember the time I took, painstakingly giving each one its own distinct shape and character. Now they blend into the background, barely visible.
When looking back on the literal big picture in our lives: singular moments always fade into the cloudy background. Memories and experiences lose their sharp edges the more time passes. Our biggest struggles and proudest accomplishments become tiny flecks of paint in the larger, finished product that is our existence.
What an infuriating notion to grapple with.
Yet without these background details — be they on the canvas, or in our lives — we lack depth, richness, and the feeling of authenticity.
Now, when I look at those far off trees in the painting, I’m reminded that even these moments are still a defining part of my identity. The coats of gray that obscure those experiences don’t trivialize them.
They just help give our present selves a better background to stand out on.
