How to Paint Mountains with Acrylics

Start with a piece of chalk and sketch your mountain shapes right onto the canvas. Draw a row of humps at different heights - a small hill, a taller one, then a couple more. Any shape works, so play with it. Chalk wipes off like a chalkboard, so if a peak looks wrong you just rub it out and try again. Getting the shapes down first takes all the pressure off the painting part.

Grab a flat chisel-edge brush and fill your mountain shapes with a dark color. Allison uses black, but any deep color works - a dark red, an orange, or a mix. Run the chiseled edge right up against your chalk lines so the silhouette stays crisp. Keep the bottoms jagged where the peaks meet the ground. Now you can see the whole range, and you can still fix any shape before it dries.

Take your chalk again and draw a squiggly line from the top of each peak down through the middle of the range. These little lines are the secret to good mountain shapes. They mark where the light meets the shadow, so when you highlight you know exactly where to stop. This is the part most beginners struggle with, and the squiggly line does the hard thinking for you.

Now the fun part. Mix white with a touch of black to soften it, then load your fan brush. Go to the top of a peak and pull down diagonally, staying inside that squiggly line. Do not go past it. Each stroke lays a bright edge on the sunny side while the dark stays put underneath as shadow. Work peak to peak and watch the mountains start to pop off the canvas.

Go easy on the pressure. Use just the very tip of the fan brush so you drag a thin, broken highlight instead of a solid wall of grey. You want the black underpainting peeking through between the strokes - that is what gives the rock its texture and depth. If you push too hard you lose the darks and the mountain flattens out. Light hand, lots of little strokes.

Mix a little blue with white for a soft shadow color. Say the sun is coming from the right, so the shadow falls on the left of each peak. Pull that blue down the shaded side with the corner of your fan brush, and dab it into the smaller gaps too. The blue cools those areas down and pushes them back, so the sunlit faces feel even brighter. Now you have real shape.

There they are - a full range of mountains with snow-capped peaks, warm light on the right and cool shadow on the left. From here you can do anything you want. Add more snow, drop in some trees, or push the highlights brighter. The shapes are locked in, so you get to have fun. If you want, you can even go back over it with a palette knife now that the layout is all in place.