Landscape Painting in Procreate: Where to Actually Start

Landscapes look like the hardest genre and are secretly the most learnable one. Freya says as much at the start of her Landscape Painting course: landscapes follow straightforward, logical guidelines, and once you know them, a convincing scene stops being a matter of talent. This post walks the beginner path she teaches, theory, elements, then a first full painting.

The horizon line is your eye level

Picture looking at the ocean: the line where water meets sky is the horizon line. In most scenes it's hidden behind hills or trees, and sometimes it's outside the frame entirely, but it still governs everything, because the horizon line represents your eye level as the viewer. Anything above it reads as looked up at; anything below it, looked down on.

From there, one-point perspective is the only construction a beginner landscape needs: pick a vanishing point on the horizon line, and draw receding lines from the corners of your shapes to that point. Freya's cube example makes the flat drawing pop into 3D with those few lines, and she deliberately stops at one-point rather than piling on every perspective system at once.

Three distances, and where the values go

A landscape splits into foreground, middle ground and background: sharp detailed textures at your feet, linking elements like trees and hills behind them, and soft, desaturated far-off shapes above the horizon. The layers work like steps that pull the viewer's eye into the painting.

The part beginners actually get wrong isn't the layout. It's the values:

"One big mistake artists often make is putting dark values in spots that should be light and vice versa. This mix-up results in a painting that feels flat, missing depth, light, atmosphere, and volume."

Freya, in the Landscape Painting Perspective Theory lesson, Landscape Painting in Procreate

Her fix is a compression trick borrowed from traditional painters: you can't paint every value nature shows you, so you ration them by distance. In the course example the sky gets roughly three shades, the middle ground four, and the foreground seven, with the brightest highlights and deepest shadows saved for what's closest. Follow that ration and depth appears almost by itself.

Build a vocabulary of elements first

Before the course paints a single scene, Freya runs a practice session on the parts, grass, a bush, a tree, a flower, a trunk and a rock, each in three to five steps with her Freya Oil Landscape brush set. Each one is a small recipe worth having:

Grass: patch in a medium green with the Freya Oil Landscape 2, layer lighter green over it and dark green beneath, then switch to the Freya Oil Landscape 34 at 2% and pull long thin blades upward in clusters. Yellow highlights go mostly in the bright spots, and a few dots of pink read as scattered flowers.

Bush: the clever one. Block layered greens with the Freya Oil Landscape 14, then do the detailing with the smudge tool loaded with the 34 brush, dragging upward from the patch to raise grass blades in varied lengths and angles. Because smudging pulls existing color, you never have to keep switching swatches.

Tree: a dark green circle-ish mass with a fuzzy brush (Freya Oil Landscape 9), edges and leaf texture dabbed on with the 68 leaf brush, volume built top-down in medium then light green, and finally a trunk of two parallel lines, zigzag roots and short brown branch marks in the gaps between leaves.

Rock: the opposite discipline. Start from a lump-of-coal silhouette, then map sharper planes with a flat brush in brownish gray, highlight the edges in angular patches, and balance with dark strokes around the highlights. Rocks want strong, defined forms where plants want looseness, and Freya finishes hers by growing tufts of grass and tiny flowers out of the cracks so it sits in a living scene.

One setup detail from the same session applies to every oil-style painting you'll make: cover the canvas with the Freya Oil Landscape Canvas 2 texture brush at 100%, set that layer to Linear Burn, and keep it above everything. Instant canvas tooth.

Your first full scene, the friendly way

If the oil elements feel like a step too far today, Freya's Masterclass has a gentler on-ramp: a playful landscape of mountains, a flower field, a pond and a walkway, built with stamp brushes you make earlier in that course.

The structure is the transferable part. A rough sketch divides land from sky about a third of the way up. Every element gets its own layer, sky, three land shapes, walkway, two mountains, pond, clouds, each drawn as a closed outline with the Dry Ink brush and filled by dragging color in. A rectangle selection filled with light yellow and softened with Gaussian Blur at around 60% becomes a sun-glow gradient in the sky. Details are clipping-masked onto their base layers, darker left sides give the mountains dimension, and then the meadow fills up with flower, grass and tree stamps, one stamp per layer, with stems and pollen painted in by hand afterward.

Nothing in that exercise is rendered realistically, and it doesn't matter. Layer discipline, closed shapes, guided details and a value-aware sky are the same skills the oil landscapes ask for later, practiced where mistakes cost nothing.

What the full course adds

Everything above is the warm-up. The Landscape Painting in Procreate course goes on to paint complete scenes, an ocean-and-sky seascape among them, where the perspective theory, the value rationing and the element recipes combine into finished oil-style paintings with the same brush set. Freya walks the reference cell by cell, names every brush, size and opacity as she goes, and the free lesson on the oil landscape page lets you watch that pace before you commit. Paint the element sampler this week, six small studies on one canvas, and you'll walk into your first real landscape already knowing how everything in it is made. 🎨