Nature Backgrounds: 16 Scenic Landscapes in Realistic and Storybook Styles

Half of these 16 nature backgrounds look realistic and half look like pages from a storybook. Designs 1 to 8 are the realistic ones. Designs 9 to 16 are illustrations with soft shapes and bright, clean color. All of them were made with AI, and all of them are invented places, not photographs of real locations.

Two styles, the same kinds of places

The realistic eight are a mossy forest path, a meadow at sunrise with fog in the valleys, a snowy peak mirrored in a clear mountain lake, a rocky beach, a fast river in a misty valley, a field of daisies and purple wildflowers, a bamboo grove with a path through it, and a rocky stream under red and orange maples.

The storybook eight return to many of the same settings in a gentler way. There is a winding path past a pond, red-spotted mushrooms at the foot of a big tree, a pale rainbow over rolling hills, a turquoise lake below snowy peaks, a sandy cove, a river through a flowery valley, a small waterfall among bamboo, and an autumn stream lined with orange trees. Flowers crowd the front of most of these.

The square is the whole picture

Each design was composed as a square, and the 3600 x 3600 JPG is that full composition. The two 16:9 files, 3840 x 2160 and 1920 x 1080, are strips cut across the full width of the square, so they show a narrower slice of the same scene, not extra scenery at the sides. Where that slice sits changes from design to design. In Mountain Lake, Rainbow Meadow and Alpine Lake it comes from the very top, so the stones and flowers along the bottom of the square are gone in the wide versions. START-HERE.txt points to the 16:9 files for screen backgrounds and the square file for prints.

One thing to know before you print big. Every scene was generated at 1254 x 1254 pixels and then enlarged, so the 3600-pixel square and the 3840 x 2160 file are bigger, not more detailed. The square carries 300 dpi in its file settings, which works out to 12 x 12 inches. START-HERE.txt says a 12-inch print needs the square JPG and a capable printer or print shop, and it suggests a test print first.

The PDFs

Both PDFs are portrait, with one square scene per page and white margins around it. On US Letter the picture is 8 inches square; on A4 it is just under 7.8 inches. The pages run in the same order as the design numbers. Print at Actual Size or 100%, and expect the colors on paper to shift a little from what you see on screen.

None of these are seamless tiles, so they will not repeat cleanly if you tile them as a pattern.