Manga Tutorials - How to Draw Grass

Forest Landscapes: Grass

By Rio

Next in line for drawing forest scenes is the other most basic plant life you must know how to draw: grass.

Drawing Grass Multiple Ways
You can draw grass in three ways from simplistic to realistic. Lets' take a look:

1. Short strokes - the most easiest and simplest way to draw grass is to draw bunched up pencil lines drawn in certain directions.
Most grasses are either drawn having one whole patch of grass going 180° or half a grass ending at 90°.
To draw them, you have to draw quick strokes to get that nice spiky grass point. Also, if you look closely, the tallest grass is at the center and lessens in size as you go outwards.
Follow the arrow to the right and you'll see an example of this grass.

2. Cone grass - moving up from the short stroke method, you have to add another step to your strokes and move your hand downwards to form a bended cone.
Much like the simple grass, you must vary the grass size. Note in the example to the right that grasses can be single bladed if it suits your purpose.

3. Realistic grass - what's different about this grass from the other two is that it becomes a bit more complicated and you really have to watch where each blade is going especially when you're drawing bunched up grass as you would find at the beach. One thing that hasn't changed is that even realistic grasses must have tall grasses at the center and shorter at the ends.
The most important aspect of drawing grass like this is bending the grass. At the bottom, I show you two ways of drawing bended grass. There are other ways to bend a grass but it's best if you try it out and experiment by yourself. Remember: always start off with the "backbone" of the grass or the one straight line that makes up the grass as I start off on both examples.

Grass and the Wind
I covered grass and wind at the tree's tutorials, but lets go back to it again. On the top example, this shows grass affected by wind as you would see it at eye level. All you need to do is draw your blades of grass bended in the direction of the wind.

Drawing grass affected by the wind when looking down on it is another matter. At the bottom half, you grass moving to the upper-right side. Note the grass is drawn to the direction of the wind making the scene look like fur is moving. If you were coloring wind movement in grass, the affected grass would be colored at a lighter shade making a ring or stripe-like pattern.

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Forest Landscapes: Grass

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