Learn to Draw Rocks in Your Digital Art Program!

Mastering the ability to draw rocks can be rather difficult at first. Not only do you need to consider the random placements of shapes and patterns, but you also need the ability to imagine how to place these geological marvels.

It will take some practice and a lot of control.

Some times, you will tend to go redraw the same shapes over and over again until you find a random pattern that fits. In this lesson, we will work with random contour and gesture sketches in your digital art program.

So whenever you're ready, load up your digital art program, begin a new drawing layer, and start learning some basic steps to draw rocks.

1. Drawing outlines

The best way to start off is to create a few random gesture drawings. This will allow you to create shapes out of nothing.

With your digital brush, draw circles and lines to help you seek out the necessary shapes. Your job is to create patterns, while at the same time, looking for abnormalities in the patterns. Remember, this step is to 'feel' the rocks emerging.

Once these gesture drawings are done, refine it a bit. Use contour drawing method to highlight the outlines. Use your eraser tool to tone down unnecessary lines that could distract you from finding those rocky outlines.

Once that has been done, the next step is to divide the shapes into planes to help with shadowing and texture.

2. Draw rocks using planes

Dividing rocks is fairly easy if you can see how light and shadows hit. As usual, if you have any annoying lines that may interfere with your ability to see light and shadows properly, I suggest you do some more cleanup.

The key is the outlines of the rocky shapes that you want to divide up.

For now, create lines to separate the shadows from the light. What is recommended is to start where each of the shapes overlap. Any part that overlaps will have shadows near it because the light will not be able to penetrate it.

The second part of division is figuring out how to put depth into those rocks. To draw rocks so it doesn't look flat require a bit of imagination that you may not see until you begin drawing those divisional lines.

If you're having troubles, begin simple shading to help you define the shadowed areas.

3. Draw rocks using values

The exercise here involves black and white values so you can see how light and shadows behave. To paint the rocks, I will get you to start a new layer and fill it completely black. This will be your background layer.

If you're having troubles seeing the shapes, I suggest changing the opacity on the filled layer so you can see the outlines that you did on the previous layers.

Now, choose a chalk-type digital brush and begin painting using white. The pressure sensitivity settings on the WACOM will create different levels of gray depending on how hard you push on your stylus.

Switch to black to get the right values if you placed too much pressure. At this time, just concentrate on painting the light as it hits your rocks. Don't forget about the small crevasses. Adjust the size of your brush accordingly.

4. Moving on

After learning to paint and draw rocks, the next step is applying colors and textures. Based on the lessons so far you can choose either to 'glaze' over the rocks with a color of your choice, paint the colors and highlights manually, or a combination of both.

With your brush, select the 'color' blend mode to cover the rocks with the desired colors. Depending on your values, it will work.

However, if it's too dark or too light, your best bet is to paint the colors in manually along with the color overlay.

Of course, there is texture that we also need to consider. Depending on the types of textures, in conjunction with color, will yield different types of rocks. At this point in time, it's up to your imagination.

As always, leave it up to practice to get the hang of it!

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