Creating a digital landscape painting in Procreate or Photoshop doesn’t have to take all week. In fact, it doesn’t have to take you more than 30 minutes if you follow the strategies I outline here.
This is called speedpainting, and it’s a technique that I use in my practice almost every day.
If you haven’t tried creating a digital landscape painting through speedpainting, you really owe it to yourself to give it a go. It’s a great way to improve your efficiency and learn to prioritize the most important elements of a painting.
Plus it’s just a great way to practice when you don’t have too much free time. Whether you work a day job, or you just want to free up time in the day to spend with family, you can easily fit this in after your morning coffee or before you brush your teeth.
1. Start painting!
This can be the hardest part of the whole process, but just start putting color on the canvas! It doesn’t matter what color or what texture you use. Start filling the white space or even use the color drop to start with a single base color.
Just start putting some texture down as well. Start mixing up the color a bit. Try variations of hue and saturation to create some base variety.
2. Add texture and refine your shapes
This is where the Procreate brushes in my ESA Brush Pack come in very handy. You can use all kinds of custom brushes to quickly create impressions of things without painting them all out by hand.
Like check out how quickly I made these trees just by using a line and a single brush:
3. Final details
Take the last 10-15 minutes to focus on one area of your painting that’s very important. (Hint: it’s best if this spot is not too close to the canvas edges and not in the direct center).
It can be whatever you want: a person, building, a really cool tree—it’s totally up to you.
All that matters is that you develop this one area of focus a bit more than the rest of the painting. This will attract the viewer’s attention and actually make the whole painting look a lot more detailed, even though you just developed that one area.
So give this a try and see what happens. It’s ok if you have to push to 45 minutes or even an hour the first time, but make it your goal to finish in a set amount of time, and try to stick with it.
Remember, the point here is not to create a masterpiece—it’s to teach yourself how to prioritize the most important elements of the painting, like the composition, overall color scheme, values, and focal area.
Do this enough and it will improve your focus and efficiency with everything you paint.
If you want to see more tutorials and stuff like this, make sure you check out my Patreon as well, where I post new content and tutorials like this every month (sometimes every week).
Cheers,
Eben