Every textured landscape comes from a small kit of marks, used over and over, and then layered — light first, dark last. Master the kit and the layering order and you can render bark, water, distant scrub or a stormy sky with the same handful of moves.
The Toolkit
There are five marks worth knowing by name. Hatching is parallel lines pulling in one direction — good for the slope of a hill or the grain of timber. Stippling is dots, dense or sparse — perfect for gravel, sand, or the speckle of foliage. Dry-brush is a near-empty brush dragged so the paint skips and breaks — that's your weathered rock and peeling bark. Washes are thin, watery layers of colour laid down flat — sky, distance, shallow water. Scumbling is a scribbly, circular tangle, loose and tonal — clouds, bushes, anything soft-edged. Five marks. That's genuinely most of it.
Layering: Light to Dark, Far to Near
Here's the habit that separates a flat drawing from a deep one. You build a landscape in layers, and you go light first, dark last — and usually far first, near last. Lay a pale wash for the whole sky and distance. Over the top, add a mid-tone for the middle ground. Then, only at the end, drop in your darkest, sharpest marks for whatever's closest — the foreground tree, the rock right at your feet. Each layer sits over the one before, so the picture gains depth the way real distance does: hazy and pale far away, crisp and dark up close.
A Worked One, Slowly
Picture a creek scene. First a flat pale-blue wash across the top third — that's your sky, done. While it dries, a thin grey-green wash for the distant hills. Now the middle ground: some scumbling for clumps of scrub, a few hatched strokes for the slope. Last, the foreground gets the loud marks — dry-brush for the rough bank, hard stippled dots for gravel, and a few crisp dark hatched lines pulled horizontally for the water catching the light. You built it back-to-front and pale-to-dark, and it reads as a place you could wade into.