100+ Mountain Painting Ideas & Tutorials [Art Landscape Inspiration Examples]

Below are 100+ mountain painting ideas that you can use as mountain art reference photos (acrylic and watercolor). These ideas are intended to provide you inspiration for your own mountain painting art. After the photos, I have included a list of mountain painting tips for beginners and nine mountain painting tutorial videos for you to learn from.

Inspiration for Mountain Painting Ideas

Acrylic Mountain Painting Ideas

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Watercolor Mountain Painting Ideas

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Mountain Painting Tips for Beginners

• Tonal Values – If you’re a beginner I recommend you to start with understanding the three main tonal values for mountains: light, mid-tone, and dark. Use light washes to establish mid-tones, then add darker tones for shadows and lighter tones for highlights, maintaining the balance for a realistic effect.

• Texture – Experiment with textured techniques like dry brush for rough mountain textures and wet-on-wet for softer, distant mountains. Tools like plastic cards or craft knives can be used to scrape off paint, creating natural-looking ridges and highlights for you mountain painting ideas.

• Gradient Background – Begin with a gradient background, starting from lighter sky colors like light blue or soft pink at the horizon, and transitioning to deeper tones higher up. This sets a mood and depth before painting the mountains.

• Wet and Dry Techniques – My advice is to use a combination of wet-on-wet techniques for blended, soft edges in distant mountains, and wet-on-dry for sharper, more defined edges in foreground mountains.

• Color Mixing – Mix colors carefully for mountain painting, often using combinations like blue and brown (e.g., cobalt blue and burnt sienna) to create natural mountain hues. Adjust the saturation depending on the distance of the mountain in the scene.

• Perspective – Pay attention to perspective by making distant mountains smaller and less detailed, and foreground mountains larger and more detailed, to enhance the sense of depth in your landscape.

• Simplified – When beginning, I recommend you to start with simpler shapes to form the basic outline of mountains. This helps in capturing the essence of the landscape without overwhelming you as a beginner.

• Palette – If you’re a beginner, I’d recommend you to choose a limited palette of earthy tones like greens, browns, and blues for a realistic mountain landscape. These colors provide a natural foundation for your mountain scene and help keep things simple to start.

• Texture – For acrylic mountains, you can use techniques like dry brushing or stippling to add texture to the mountain surface. This gives a more realistic and rugged appearance to the landscape.

• Perspective – For distant mountains, use lighter and bluer shades. This technique, known as atmospheric perspective, creates an illusion of depth in the landscape. Also, pay attention to the direction of light and how it affects the mountains. Highlight the peaks where the light hits and use darker shades for the shadowed areas to enhance the 3D effect.

• Sky – The sky can dramatically change the mood of your painting. Choose a clear blue for a serene day or incorporate reds and oranges for a dramatic sunset. Also, you can include elements like trees, rivers, or wildlife to add life and detail to your mountain scene. These features can also help in establishing scale and perspective.

• Practice Observation – I like to study real mountains and landscapes for inspiration. Observing real-life examples helps me improve my understanding of color, form, and perspective in mountain painting scenes.

Mountain Painting Tutorials for Beginners

Below are mountain painting idea tutorials (for both acrylic and watercolor) so you can follow along and learn from popular online creators for inspo:

Acrylic Mountain Tutorial – This tutorial guides viewers through sketching and painting a mountain, focusing on techniques like layering with a palette knife and creating texture with colors like cerulean blue, violet, and yellow ochre. Click here to view.

Watercolor Mountain Tutorial – This tutorial demonstrates three mountain painting techniques using tonal values and textured effects, employing tools like a plastic card and a craft knife for highlights and details. Click here to view.

Acrylic Mountain Tutorial – This tutorial offers a step-by-step guide for beginners to paint a mountain landscape on an 8 x 10-inch canvas. It teaches blending, depth creation, and color mixing with a limited, simple palette of cobalt blue and cadmium red. Click here to view.

Watercolor Mountain Tutorial – This tutorial explores various techniques for creating textured watercolor mountains, focusing on dry brush and wet on wet methods, and encourages experimentation with paint-to-water ratios and brush strokes. Click here to view.

Acrylic Mountain Tutorial – This beginner-friendly time-lapse tutorial demonstrates painting a winter lake and mountain landscape. It also covers techniques for painting water reflections and grass. Click here to view.

Watercolor Mountain Tutorial – This tutorial teaches a beginner-friendly watercolor mountain silhouette painting, emphasizing gradient washes and layering for a misty, sunset backdrop. Click here to view.

Acrylic Mountain Tutorial – This tutorial provides a three-step approach to painting mountains with acrylics, emphasizing shape formation with chalk, filling in with dark colors, and highlighting with a fan brush for realistic textures. Click here to view.

Watercolor Mountain Tutorial – This beginner-oriented tutorial guides through painting sharp, detailed mountains using a combination of cobalt blue, burnt sienna, and various brushes for creating a realistic landscape. Click here to view.

Watercolor Mountain Tutorial – This is an advanced tutorial on painting snow-capped mountain winter scene. It uses masking fluid and various techniques to create a misty, atmospheric mountain landscape. Click here to view.