Down in the Cartoon Valley

Drawing a cartoon valley is a bit more difficult than some of the other cartoon drawings we’ve discussed before, but it can still be accomplished in just four steps.

Sit down at your drawing chair and with a little determindation we'll blast through this lesson in four simple steps. Are you ready? Let's rock and roll!

Step 1 - The Forming the Mountain Range
In order to have a valley, you must surround it with mountains. We are going to create two sloping lines that come in toward each other but don’t touch. These two lines curve down and are not perfectly even or smooth. Lines should be bumpy just as they would appear in real life.

Step 2 - A River and the Background
Now that we have the mountains of our cartoon valley, we can begin to draw the backdrop. Create craggy peaks between the two slopes for a mountainous background. Get creative and draw multiple peaks with rugged, uneven and broken lines.

Coming from the base of the mountain on the right side of your paper, start another minimally squiggly line that angles down more steeply. This line will make one side of the river that runs through the valley.

Step 3 - Clouds, Bushes, and a Stream
Let’s start with clouds. Coming off the top of each of your most forward mountains, you want to draw a straight line that will come almost to the center of the drawing, leaving just a small space between the two lines. Above these lines, you can get creative with the shape of your cloud structures, billowing them up to whatever height you like.

The squiggly line you drew at the end of step two is going to be a stream, and you can create another curved line coming out, widening creatively as you move further down into the valley. This will give the effect of depth as the river should look larger as it gets toward the front of the drawing.

Around the stream, you can create some bushes to keep the area from looking too empty. These structures will look like the clouds but will not be solid on the bottom.

Step 4 - Adding more Details
Below your current clouds, your cartoon valley should have some other cloud structures, smaller but formed similarly.

Atop your right hand mountain, you can cap it with trees by adding your cloudlike billows upside down and in smaller bubbles. Add more shrubs and bushes as you see fit, and create individual trees on your left hand mountain around your shrubs to give a little variation to the trees.

Technically, that’s all there is to a cartoon valley! I suggest coloring in your drawing to finish it off. That's all there is to this easy step by step drawing of a cartoon valley.

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