Learn How to Paint an Atmospheric Perspective!

Here is where we apply what we know and create a simple painting using atmospheric perspective (aerial perspective)! By now, you should be familiar with basic digital painting techniques and three point perspective!

As a budding professional artist, you should be using the techniques found in this lesson in whatever you do as a quick means to shape ideas for your clients.

Remember to work on a general level first instead of creating details. The whole point is for you to walk away at anytime during the planning phase with something you can show to your clients.

Spending extra time just means you are working on extra details that are not too important to the whole compositions.

This is how you save the most valuable asset as an artist: time!

1. Setting up a third point perspective

Use the diagrams that are on this site to help you out with this part. Otherwise, create your own third point perspective with the lessons you have learned in the previous sections.

Of course, if three point perspectives are too difficult for now, you can use a two point perspective diagram for this part as that works just as well.

The point here is to have some sort of perspective lines to help you out with creating depth.

On your digital canvas, you should being blocking in shapes for your landscape using a chalk brush.

Pick colors to help you distinguish between the sky, the land, and whatever objects (like a castle in this case) you decide to place on the land.

Use the perspective lines to help you with creating a semi aerial view of the entire surroundings. We are not worried too much about colors for now.

2. Refining your aerial perspective

The first step in understanding atmospheric perspective is to understand how color works. When any object is close to the horizon, it fades into the background color.

That is, there is less contrast to be found. Another rule of thumb is that cooler colors fade objects out of depth while warmer colors bring it to the foreground.

With this in mind, you will need to start sampling colors from the palette you have created in the first step.

For example, fade in bits of the green land by sampling the colors of the sky. Using a large sized brush, just gently glaze over the horizon of your land.

You will notice that the greenish colors of the land will quickly de-saturate into the blue colors of the sky.

As you work on this simple concept, put in mountain ranges in by sampling colors and lightly suggest mountainous rock in the distance.

For specific details on your objects, working with this type of perspective is simple if you know how to distort your textures.

Here's how! Create a new layer and paint in whatever textures you need such as bricks or cracks.

Then, use internal distortion options (scaling, skewing, rotating, etc) in your digital art program and distort the shape to match your perspective. Merge it to your main painting if necessary.

You can even clone additional textures from one area to another as a quick means to get all the details in.

Do this all around for your object and you will have a detailed object without putting a lot of time repeating details!

3. Creating your atmospheric perspective

Now that you have all the details in place with the right colors, it's time to really start working with depth in your digital painting!

This particular step is actually quite easy. You need to create a new layer and then glaze it over with the colors that create depth.

Recall what I said earlier: cooler colors and colors with reduced saturation will push everything to the background.

So in this step, you want to pick a dull base color and glaze over a large area around the horizon.

If you're painting a sunrise or sunset, make sure it's a dull red, orange, or yellow. Otherwise, glaze it using a dull blue/gray color.

Do not worry about the details of the objects in your painting. Since the large streak of glazed color is on a different layer, you can always get your detailed objects back.

In fact, we will do that in the next step to finish creating your atmospheric perspective!

4. Erasing out details

This final step simple requires you to start erasing out the glazed color to reveal the details underneath.

Naturally, you want to align your eraser brush to the pressure sensitivity settings of your digital stylus.

The reason for that is that we don't want to erase it all completely. Partial erasing can add more depth in your object based on the distance it is from the horizon.

In other words, the closer it is to the foreground, the harder you will erase out of the atmospheric color. Similarly, when you want to suggest distance for objects far away while still retaining the details, just erase very lightly.

Once you are done with this step, consider merging it together and work on lighting details.

Any time that you feel as though the atmospheric perspective is not correct, you can always repeat the steps until you get it right.

You can also repeat this technique to create shadows or any other additional lighting or color effects.

Once you get good at these steps, you should be able to create quick full-color thumbnail sketches for you client.

And if your client is satisfied with one of the thumbnail sketches, increase the size of the thumbnail and work on the details to create your finished piece of work.

I hope you enjoyed this digital painting session on creating atmospheric perspective. I look forward to your work. Please submit it on this site's gallery!

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