Tips for Painting Sand Textures!

Would you like to learn how to paint sand textures? It's easier than you think because the art of painting sand textures and desert landscapes caters to the idea of 'less is more'!

Unlike forest environments of multiple churning colors, you get a sense of unity from just a few hues coming from desert landscapes!

So while these landscapes are desolate and unforgiving, there is a sense of beauty that comes from the patterns of the sand dune and the many ages of calmness that has created this weathered landscape.

Your goal through this lesson is to paint the vast emptiness of a simple desert while adding enough details to show off the natural forces which made the desert in the first place.

Ready to start?

1. Background layers

Like all of the lessons on this site, painting sand textures requires a good supporting background to work. Using your imagination and think how a desert would look like in real life!

For this example, I have opted for a huge area full of bright blue skies and brown desolate sands as the setting for my dunes.

As you paint your background, keep as many layers open as much as possible in case you want to make revisions in your background like color or shape corrections.

Switch from large and small brushes for the finer details like clumps of clouds. Remember, you should be painting light as the main method for creating new objects.

2. Sand dune

Once you have your background in place, it's time for painting sand textures itself! We will start with a few triangular shapes to form little hills and give elevation.

The closer you are to the background horizon, the smaller these little hills will be. Do not forget about colors either. That is, the color that is closer to the horizon will fade to a lighter shade because of the air in the atmosphere.

Aside from the small hills, the other key here is to think about how to merge the hills together so it forms a continuous unity of sand.

To do that, you will be painting light near the top of the little hills and link it to other elevated peaks. It is almost like an elevated crisscross pattern: left right, up, and down.

If you're having difficulties imagining it, try drawing a perspective grid to help you out.

3. Details in the sand

From the backgrounds to the sand hills, your desert landscapes need to also consider how sand is blown in this environment.

Here is where I suggest using the dodge tool here for painting sand textures . Basically, you will be using this tool to highlight the smooth wrinkles in the sand.

Again, a perspective grid will help immensely here. Start from the top of a hill and begin to paint wavy swirls down the hill slope. Make sure it fits in with your perspective grid in that it's spreading out from a central vanishing point near the horizon.

Give variations too! You don't want the swirls to be too consistent and follow the same pattern after one another.

Switch to the brush tool if you need to make simple color adjustments. Sample colors from neighboring pixels with the eyedropper if you have to. Be as random as possible and make sure that you don't paint the swirls all the way to the horizon.

4. Final touches

Now that you have your composition painted out, it's time to refine it a little more. The two things to do in this step are color correction and adding additional details.

Depending on what you're trying to achieve, you can always change the colors with the tools you have available. Originally, when I was painting sand textures , I used the default color palettes in my program.

It was a good starting point but felt the colors were not natural enough. Hence, I repainted the correct colors by sampling other colors of the palette.

Switch your brush settings to paint with the 'color' blend mode so you can paint over your sand dunes while keeping the hard work you did with the details.

Remember to add more details if you want a refined look to your painting like adding more clouds, more hills, or more sand swirls.

Use the sharpen tool to bring out additional details you want to highlight. Other than that, it will up to your basic artistic foundations and what you know about composition. Good luck, remember to practice, and have fun!

I hope you enjoy this digital art lesson. Please submit your creations as I look forward to what you have painted!

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