How you choose to display mountains will depend on three things: the visual style you’re trying to achieve, your skills with drawing, and how much time you want to spend making them. I’m going to discuss three basic styles here and describe their benefits and drawbacks.

This post is about skill application. If you want to learn about strategies for correctly placing, sizing, and labeling mountains (or about how plate tectonics may affect your world), you should read Designing Fantasy Outdoors Maps (which will eventually point you here).

This tutorial assumes that you have created mountain range guides, as explained in Designing Fantasy Outdoors Maps.

Take One: Shapes

In this method, you draw the outside edges of your mountains as shapes and then allow Photoshop to figure out the mid-line ridge point and draw corresponding highlights and shadows. This method has the advantage of being very fast to do but it has a lot of disadvantages: the results can be unexpected, the mountains can look crude even when done well, and it’s much slower to edit after the fact.

First, you’re going to draw the mountain shapes.

Now apply some style. This is going to be all about applying a bevel.

Play around with the opacity and blend modes of the bevel highlights and shadows or even the layer itself. Maybe add a texture. When adding textures, you may be tempted to use the “Texture” section in the Bevel & Emboss effect. Don’t. Use a pattern overlay.

You can use this technique to make soft hills, too. Use the Freeform Pen tool to make a looping wave shape.

If you have bevel shaped mountains pushed up against an uneven shoreline, you’re going to want to cut them down to work with the shoreline. This is one of the reasons why mountains drawn with the Pen tool are less desirable than hand drawn mountains. The trick is to rasterize the mountain layers and then clip them to the shape of the coastline.

You will probably want to go in there with the Brush tool and add some lines to prettify it.

Take Two: Stamps

This technique is really about using stamps but you use a bush. This method has an advantage in that anyone can do it (you don’t really have to know how to draw) and it automatically lends itself to a kind of “old world map” feel. A disadvantage is that it is incredibly slow to use.

You’re going to pick a brush that has the shape of a mountain on it and “stamp” it into the canvas. This method is entirely pixels.

You will need to select the right brush – one that has a mountain shape you like. These brush shapes can range from simple inverted “V” shapes to complex drawings of mountain ranges. If you try drawing a line with one of these brushes, you’re going to get a weird, fuzzy line. This is almost certainly not what you want.

There are hundreds of pre-made brushes to be found for this purpose (just search “Photoshop Mountain Brushes” or something similar; there are tons on Deviant Art). Search for “How to Import Photoshop Brushes” to add them when you find some. You can also make your own (the process is similar to importing a texture, but search the interwebs for “How to Make Photoshop Brushes”).

Let’s assume you’ve found a brush you like.

You’re going to be very careful about where your mountains go. Stamping individual mountains in a long range is going to get really tedious really fast, so you may want to find a “Mountain Range” brush. Remember that you can set the brush’s size so you can make some mountains larger than others. Ideally you’ll have a library.

Stamping is easy and follows a simple loop.

You should be able to see the shape of the brush while you do this: the cursor should reshape itself to the exact size. If it isn’t doing that, turn it on.

Pick a variety of mountains and hills shapes to use and mix them up. Don’t forget that you’re working in pixels! Once a stamp is down, it can be modified with the eraser tool or other brush tools.

Take Three: Freehand Drawing

This is the method I most often use because I find it to be the prettiest with the style I like to use. It’s advantage is that it is super flexible (you can make the mountains look how you want them to) and very pretty but it has disadvantages in that it is slower to do, it assuredly requires a pen tablet, and you need to have some basic drawing skills.

I modified my technique from one I originally found at Fantastic Maps (which is a wonderful site and you should read all of it).

You’re going to want a pen tablet for this. Doing this with a trackpoint or a mouse is going to be tedious. As Ramirez said to MacLeod in Highlander: I would spare you that pain.

You’re going to make a lot of layers. You’ll want to label them in such a way that you can easily remember what you did, which means including your brush settings in the layer’s name. Each layer will have a purpose. You’re making separate layers so that you can adjust their blend modes and opacity values independently later.

While I recommended making individual ranges their own layers when working in shapes, don’t do this here.

You’ll need to make several layers.

Drawing the Ridge Lines

First, draw the mountain range’s ridge lines.

When drawing the spurs, feel free to let these lines “dash” in places. Ideally, you can let the opacity of the ends drop. I like to “fork” the tail and head of the centerline ridge as well. As you go, you’ll start to see the mountains take shape.

Remember your brush settings? You may want to come back and edit this layer later using the same brush. Rename the Ridgeline layer to include that information. Something like “Ridgeline (1PX HR:PO #222222)” for 1 pixel, hard round, pressure opacity, and color (I always work with #222222 and #dddddd so I tend to omit that).

Adding Base Shadows and Highlights

Now, you’re going to add in the broad, larger shadows and highlights.

Don’t fret overmuch if you “color outside of the lines”; the blending will deal with that. Feel free to go over areas multiple times to darken, but don’t make it black. Darker shadows will come across as steeper edges away from the light, so that’s the information you’re imparting. They should fade to nothing at the ends (the mountain’s feet).

Remember to rename your Fat Darks layer before moving on to adding highlights.

Don’t worry if you go over areas that are already shadowed; that’s fine. It will help to create texture. You’re going to be drawing on both sides of the mountain range, mind, just more on one side than the other.

Adding Deep Shadows and Highlights

Once that’s done, you’ll add in darker and lighter areas, implying more texture and details on the Thins layers.

When you’re happy with that, rename your Thin Darks layer to include your brush information, and move on to the Thin Lights.

When you’re done, remember to rename the layer.

Voila! Play around with the blend modes and opacity values of each layer to get the effect that you want. I typically set the main ridgeline layer to Overlay at this point (it’s easier to work with when Normal).

Adding Color

You’ll want to add some color to them now.

You can obviously use different colors for this (browns, for instance). As long as the blend mode is set to Color, everything will work out.

Adding Snow

Snow covered peaks can be tricky given the various blend modes you’re using. You’ll have to change the blend modes for the Ridgeline, Thin Darks, and Thin Fats layers to Multiply. This may end up appearing harsh, so you may want to play with the individual layer opacity values (say 75%).

You’ll find that you really don’t see the snow easily where you’ve placed your shadows. This makes sense, but it doesn’t quite feel realistic. Ideally you’d be able to do funky things with blend modes; however, with light colors there won’t be much difference with the lighten modes (Overlay, Lighten, Screen, Color, Luminosity) and the snow will disappear entirely with all the other modes.

We can fix this by reducing the intensity of the shadows that bleed into the snow layer.

You can experiment with moving the Snow layer to the top and playing with its opacity and maybe find something you like. Play around with your ridgeline opacity. You may want to change its color with a color overlay. Experiment and find your style!