How To Make A Hill In Photoshop

Start with a very loose idea:

Loose Idea

Marquee tool to quickly go over the High:

Marquee the high

Add your high color:

Plateau color

If I printing Cmd/Ctrl+Plataeu thumbnail on Layer Panel it will select it for me. Then practise Select → Alter → Expand. I used xv pixels. Notice the bottom of the Plateau and the Selection now have an outset to information technology:

Plateau with offset

Create a layer beneath, color it, repeat. Use progressively smaller expansion sizes. The more than you do the nicer information technology'll look:

(Note: If you take Adobe Illustrator you lot could utilise the Blend function to do this a bit automated for you)

Colors

Add in your Water:

Added Water

Add a very sparse stroke to your water:

Water with Stroke

I and then used a drawing tablet to add some modest lines to it. Lower you go the less pronounced they become. This can exist done with mouse or even strokes and masks, simply a drawing tablet certainly helps:

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Alright allow'southward add a bit of a drop off on the bottom to the water. At this signal I'thousand going to use brushes and drawing tablet merely y'all could again use the selection > expansion > make full method like you used earlier. Later on I accept a base shape since I'thou going to do a footling airbrushing, I'm going to add together a layer mask:

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Then I tin employ my airbrushes to smoothen information technology:

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Again add a few lines here and there merely for some texture and such:

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Alright so now information technology'southward at a pretty good place without any manmade structures or trees still. That bottom right looks a flake more than ridgy though and a key part is having at least something look less like a ridge and more than similar a hill. Let'south try to get back and gear up that up a bit. I simply used airbrush here, if you don't take a tablet then use lots of colors with your mouse and possibly smudge it as well:

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But still hills have some drops then add together just very very few lines.

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I'yard gonna stop here. The more particular, texture, colors you add the improve. Next thing to practice is drop-off to water on bottom left now that the loma is stock-still. After that I would probably get-go with buildings. Once the buildings are in I'd add together lighter and darker areas to the ground, then trees between the buildings, and finally details like bridges, walls, maybe some textures and labels.

Notice the light is coming from the left side so afterward I add in the structures and whatnot I would want to adjust the colors to indicate this. The left side of the valley should exist a bit darker than the right. I'm non sure what the "correct" way to exercise this is but I would practise that later on adding buildings. Come across like hither how much lighter this section is:

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Hope this helps you lot out. Entire process took me an hr, would've been less if I wasn't taking screenshots and documenting as I went. Terminal expect:

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