Recently, I have been working on background images for my game. Today, I decided to hit two birds with one stone by showing you viewers how to draw mountains. The mountain I’ll be drawing will be in my game. To avoid people from copying my work, I’ll add watermarks for the last two steps. This is really easy, so there’s no reason why someone would want to copy it anyways. Let’s get started.

Step 1

For my mountain, I chose to make a 480×320 image, but you can choose any size you like. Draw an outline of a mountain, it should look like a squiggly line like the image below. Make sure you use a brush thicker than one pixel, and that the brush is blocky. This way when we add our color, the paint bucket will fill the color correctly.

Step 2

Just like drawing pyramids, add extra lines to make the image appear 3D. Don’t make it too straight, you want to draw crappy pyramids. Crappy pyramids make good mountains.

Step 3

Next, you want to add the main colors. There will be two: the dark side & the light side. Pick the colors you want, and make the outline color the same as the dark side color.

Step 4

Now, add a third color. This should be between your dark, and your light color. The third color will be the shadow color for your main light color, and the lighting for the main dark color. Start with the light side, and use the third color to draw your shadows. After that, you can use that same color to draw light on the dark side of your mountain.

Step 5

If you want to add snow, just change your main colors at the top.

Step 6

To make it look more like snow, get a different brush, or a tool that has a spray-like effect, and spread-out more snow. If you want to finish here, you can, but I want to make this background seamless so I can make it scroll in the game.

Step 7

If you have photoshop you can use the offset tool (located in filter > other > custom), and move the image horizontally. If you don’t have photoshop don’t worry, you can still do this, it just takes a little longer. To do this without photoshop, you have to use the select tool. Select half of the image on the left side and cut it. Move the right side of the image all the way to the left, and paste the image you previously cut, and move it all the way to the right. If you did it correctly, you’re image should look something like this.

Step 8

To make the background seamless, you simply just fix the seam by drawing one peak over the other.

Step 9

This last step, I just gave it a few more touches. I removed the outlines. With the select tool, I selected the whole image (not including the transparent background), and filled the image with a really transparent white-blue color. This makes the mountain appear far-distant.