To continue with our map theme, I decided I’d share a quick tutorial on how I make mountains.

I start with a squiggle. (The line on the right is a country border.)

Then I add a few lines to suggest peaks.

I add some more lines to give the mountains crags and depth.

Time for more squiggles. This time I add some foothills and valleys to help blend the mountains into the surrounding land.

Finally, on a layer below the line work, I add some loose shading. Generally, I’ll add this in sepia, but for the purposes of this tutorial, I just used grey. You can add a few highlights if you like, especially if the mountains are snowy, but I try to keep the “painting” aspect of the mountains to a minimum to help them blend into the larger map.

The image below is from a different map (I haven’t finished the above yet), but you can get an idea of how the finished mountains look. Here, I’ve layered a scanned watercolor texture into the background and added trees, rivers, etc.

Let me know if there are other tutorials like this that you’d like to see in future posts.