Beginner's Watercolor Galaxy

1. Welcome: Hi, my name is Colby and I am here to teach you all about creating watercolor galaxies in this beginner's guide to watercolor galaxy class. I love watercolor and I love creating beautiful things using very simple techniques. I think it's very rewarding to break down processes like this into very simple steps that honestly anyone can do to create stunning pieces of art that you can be proud of. I did not consider myself an artist until about two years ago and it took a lot of mental overcoming some arbitrary limits that I put on myself and on my identity. But once I did, it was like a whole new world was open to me. So I'm very passionate about the fact that anyone can be an artist. Anyone can learn these things. It just takes practice and you have to put in the work, but if you put in the work, you will see the results. Today, we're going to create galaxies that look like this, and we're going to learn techniques for creating these galaxies and for creating stars using three main methods that I've used in the years that I've been creating galaxies. Ultimately, this is what my final project galaxy is going to look like. I've created lots of galaxies like that one including this one. If you want to check out some more galaxies I've done, feel free to look on my Instagram page. My handle is this writing desk, but I'm more interested in coming up and helping you create your own beautiful swirling clouds of color. That's how I think of galaxies. Without further ado, head on over to the materials video, and we'll gather everything you'll need, and I just can't wait to learn with you. Thanks for stopping by. 2. Materials: Welcome to the materials video where I go over all the materials that you'll need for this class and why I choose these specific tools. First, I'm going to talk about paint. If you've taken any of my other classes, you know that there's a difference between professional watercolor paint and student grade watercolor paint. It mostly has to do with how pure the pigment is, and that means how vibrant the color will be. Professional watercolor paint typically is more vibrant. When you mix the colors together, they aren't as muddy. I would recommend investing in professional watercolor paint if you can. If you can't, that's okay too. This will totally work, but that's just my recommendation. I have two sets of paints with me. Here I have Winsor and Newton Professional Watercolor paint, and I have Schmincke watercolor paint, which is also professional grade. Both of these brands are top of the line. I use lots of other different brands, but I'm going to demonstrate both of these today. For our galaxies today, we're going to focus on the primary palate. Instead of having dozens of different colors to try to figure out what's going to work together, we're going to use red, yellow, and blue and explore color theory a little bit. One of the future videos to give you some sure-fire ways to have colors in your galaxy that work really well together. No matter what paint you use, just make sure to have some kind of hue that's red, yellow, and blue, and then also black, black to do the space part. That's paint. Next, brushes. I also recommend getting professional grade brushes if you can. Though, I will say, if you know of the difference between sable hair and synthetic sable hair, sable hair is real hair. I have a brush here and that's like that. This is a primer brush and this is real sable hair in it. It juts out a little bit more, the bristles. I actually prefer synthetic sable hair to real sable hair, which is nice because [LAUGHTER] synthetic sable hair is typically a bit cheaper. This is the brand Utrecht Sablette series 228. You can tell by the black handles. Utrecht, I believe is exclusively oblique art materials brand. That's where I bought these. If you don't have a Blick's store near you, they also sell online. These are the paint brushes I use very often and I'm going to be using a round number 10. Round brushes indicates the shape of the brush. I'm going to be using a round number 10, a round number 2, and a round number 0. Those are the brushes that you're going to need. Paper is probably the next most important thing. I have two different paper here. Both of them are watercolor paper, and both of them are cold press, watercolor paper. The different watercolor paper are hot press, cold press, and rough, and that just indicates how rough the paper is, so how much tooth it has. Hot press is really smooth, cold press has a little bit of texture, and rough has a lot of texture. I'm using cold press 140 pounds or 300 grams. I would not recommend going lower than 140 pounds. The paper is going to buckle honestly regardless what you do unless you stretch the paper beforehand, which is an arduous process that I'm not going to go into here because I never do it, especially when you're doing galaxies because we're going to do a lot of washes. We're going to be using a lot of water to get the effect that we want. Do not go lower than 140 pounds or your paper is going to warp a lot. I have student grade watercolor paper and professional grade watercolor paper. We're going to be using student grade to practice and to do some of the techniques, and then when I do the final project, I'm going be using professional grade watercolor paper. Now, professional grade is typically a little bit more expensive and that's because it is more absorbent and it also makes the colors brighter. Professional grade takes washes a lot better than student grade watercolor paper does. If you can, I would recommend getting professional grade. There are a lot, some of them are really expensive, but I'm using the Blick Premier watercolor block here and actually, this is not that much more expensive than jumping for a student grade watercolor paper pad. I think I bought this for $14 on Blick's online shop. They have them for 60 percent off or something. I got this 20 sheets, 7 by 10 block for $14. These watercolor pads, these Canton Excels, can sometimes sell for up to that much too. They can sell a lot cheaper also. I think I bought this one for $5. But anyway, professional watercolor paper is the way to go for final projects with galaxies. But again, if you don't have access to it, totally fine. You can use student grade, and that's where the painter's tape comes in. Especially when I'm using student grade watercolor paper, it's important for the most part, tape down your paper on whatever table you're using because that makes a makeshift block so the paper won't buckle as much. As if you were just doing it if the paper were floating free hand. Now, one of the techniques we're going to go over the paper is going to be floating free hand. That will be interesting. But for the most part, if you're using student grade watercolor paper, I would recommend getting painter's tape or artist's tape, some masking tape, some tape that will be nice to your paper, so it won't tear it apart, but it will tape down your paper so it keeps it in place. That's painter's tape. I would also recommend having a pencil, and an eraser to go with the pencil if you'd like. I also use Q-tips a lot when I do galaxies, because while water is crucial for our galaxy creation, having pools of water is not our friend. [LAUGHTER] The pools of water are not our friends. Q tips are to mop up some excess water and different paint. For the stars, you will need either white gouache, which is like watercolor, except it's more opaque. I have Winsor and Newton zinc white gouache right here. Or I use Dr Ph Martin's Bleed Proof White, also a lot. Then I like to use a white gel pen. This is a Uni-ball Signo white gel pen to draw in some extra stars or a comet. Or if you don't have access to gouache or bleed proof white, you can very easily draw in your stars using a white gel pen. I would also recommend having an empty palette. I like these round little guys because they also act as a guide if you want to do around galaxy, which one of the galaxies that we're going to create today will be round and I will be using this as a guide. But most important is to have the palette because we're going to be mixing our colors in case whatever method of paint you have doesn't already have a palette attached. Last but not least, two things, make sure to have a rag or paper towel or something like that to mop up the water and to use when you're water coloring. I have two mugs over here full of clean water. I always have two containers of clean water when I do watercolor. One is always clean and then one can be the dirty one. I like to use mugs also because they are a little bit more firm than cups. [LAUGHTER] I worry all the time about accidentally knocking over my water. Those are the materials, I'm also going to be using an embossing heat tool to dry in-between layers, which is something that's totally up to you. This is what mine looks like. I got it for maybe $10 on Amazon. I get this question a lot. What's that blue thing that you use to draw your work with? Well, this is it. There are lots of different brands. If you want one of those, checkout Craft Store or Amazon or something like that, and I'm sure you'll find one. But I'm going to be using that as well. I think that about wraps it up for the materials section. The next step for you is to gather whatever materials you're going to use and head to the next video. I can't wait. 3. Color theory: Welcome to the video segment on color theory. The reason we are spending a whole video on color theory is because selecting which colors you're going to use for your galaxy is probably one of the most important decisions that you are going to make in order to have a successful galaxy painting. I have been burned way too many times by selecting colors that I thought would look good together and then it just turns into a brown, muddy mess that I have to recycle. We're going to go through just the basics, really just one term, one aspect of color theory. The reason we're doing that is to show you a sure-fire way to select colors that will work well together and be harmonious and beautiful to the people who are looking at your galaxy every single time. First things first, really the only term that we are going to talk about relating to color theory in this video is hue. A hue is any color that's on the color wheel and that's not diluted in any way, that's not manipulated to be lighter or darker, which are different aspects of color theory that maybe we'll talk about in a later class. But for now we're just talking about hue and just so you know, hue, meaning any color on the color wheel, means that white, black, and gray, which is just a combination of white, black, and gray, those are not hues. Hues are pure colors that are not diluted in any way by white, black, or gray. You can use hues to create other hues, which is how we get the color wheel. Because our primary colors, red, blue, and yellow, are the founders of every color on the color wheel. You cannot mix different hues to create red, blue, or yellow. But by mixing these colors, you create every color on the spectrum. That's why in the materials section of this class, I told you you really only need red, blue, and yellow watercolors because we're going to create everything that we need using these colors. In order to explore this more, we are going to create a color wheel. I want you to go ahead and create a circle. I used this little remote thing as my guide and separate it into 12 slices. The way you do that, because it took me a second to figure out, is you make a Y shape separating the circle into thirds and then once you have a set of thirds, you separate that you create quarters in the thirds. I did that just by cutting it in half and then cutting the half in half again because when you have three, you need four parts of those three bigger parts to create 12. Just a little math for you. We have our color wheel and now we are going to show you how to create primary colors, secondary colors, and tertiary colors. Now, think for a second, I'm sure you know what the primary colors are. Red, yellow, and blue. We're going to start with those. Really you just have to pick any slice, but just make sure that there are three slices in-between each primary color. I'm going to start with red right here and I'm just going to paint this whole slice red. I'm using my Schmincke set right now. I have two sets of primary colors that I will be using to demonstrate in this class. For the color wheel, I'm just going to use my Schmincke set, which has a bit of brighter colors. But you'll see me use the Winsor & Newton set also, which are slightly different variations of red, yellow, and blue that are a little bit warmer, not quite as bright, but also create beautiful paintings. There's red. Now I'm going to get my light yellow from Schmincke. In my Schmincke set this is light yellow carmine and then Phthalo blue, I think, is the other one. I want to make sure there are three slices in-between my primary colors. I'm now painting this yellow. If there's watercolor, there's always going to be a little bit of shading with the water, unless you get it really thick. It doesn't have to look completely like a block of yellow because this is watercolor. But anyway, in case you're worried about that. Now I'm going to do blue. This is my Phthalo blue. Phthalo is spelled with a P-T-H, pretty sure that's how you pronounce it. It might not be how you pronounce it, but I'm pretty sure it is. As I've mentioned in other of my classes, I am a self-taught artist. I could very easily get things wrong, but I make sure to do my research before I teach you guys anything. There are primary colors. The reason we want three slices in-between our primary colors is because in-between here, we're going to create our secondary colors and our tertiary colors. Secondary colors are the hues that you create when you combine primary colors directly with each other. As you can imagine, that means this slice is going to be orange, this slice is going to be purple or violet, and this slice is going to be green. We're going to have equal parts red and equal parts yellow to get to those secondary colors. This is where, if you have a palette with whatever watercolors you're using, then go ahead and use that. But if you don't, I like using these plastic pallets. I'm putting a little bit of red in here and wiping off my brush and then loading up on some yellow. I might have gotten a little bit more yellow than I wanted to, so I'm going to get just a little bit more red. That looks much more like the neutral orange we're going for. I got this color, I didn't use any orange watercolor paint. I got this color by mixing red and yellow together. I know it sounds basic, but if you're like me, it can be so tempting to just buy every single color of every single watercolor under the Sun because you just want all the colors. But part of this class is to show you that you really don't need to break the bank buying every single color to get all the beautiful colors that you want. I will say also that this color wheel breaking it down into primary, secondary, and tertiary colors, it just scratches the surface of what you can do with combining different hues. This is just the basics to teach you what you can do and I would also recommend after this, experimenting with different colors that you have and getting different color combinations. Because I guarantee that you will be able to get the colors that you want, but maybe not. You can't afford to buy 100 watercolor tubes, I know that I can't, so that's why color theory is important. We have orange. Now I'm going to go for green, combining equal parts yellow with equal parts blue to create this nice green that goes right smacked up in the middle. Those are two of our secondary colors. Now, one more. We are going to create violet using equal parts blue, there's more in here, with equal parts red. I might have grabbed a little more red than I was intending to. That looks fine. I'm going to do just a little bit more blue. That's better. Sometimes it's hard to get exactly equal parts. I just eyeball it with how I think the color should look. Because I know that our tertiary colors are going to be slightly different hues. As you can imagine, just looking at the color wheel, our tertiary colors are the ones that are left. Basically it means combining a primary color with a secondary color to get the tertiary color. In order to get, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to take a little bit of each of these secondary colors and put them into their own palette, because we know that to create tertiary colors, we need to combine the primary colors, and this way it's a little easier than reconstructing the colors every time. I've put them each into their own little thing. I might need a little bit more green but that's okay. Starting with red again, to get this color, which so aptly called is red orange, with this little bit of orange I have here, I'm going to get just a little bit of red to make it so it's like equal parts, and there's my red orange. It just acts as a buffer, like an in-between color for red and orange for the secondary and primary colors. We're going to be relying on this concepts a lot when we do our galaxies. Now I'm moving on to this tertiary color, which say it with me, is called yellow orange. This is red orange now, this is still orange, so I'm going to take just a little bit of yellow, maybe a little too much, a little bit of yellow and combine it with this orange that I have to create a much lighter orange that is in-between yellow and orange, and I just call it the yellow orange. They want to make it easy for you. Instead of having to memorize a million different names like you do when you have to buy different watercolor tubes with different pigments. There's my yellow, orange. Great. Now I'm just going through and doing that every time. I'm now doing yellow-green. I'm adding a little bit of yellow to this green that I have right here. It's making it a much lighter green. I probably could add a little bit more yellow actually to make them more along the lines of what I was thinking there, and do a mix. This is my yellow-green. If you're mixing different hues to create the secondary and tertiary colors, you should mix them very well, because if you don't mix them very well, sometimes you can see little specks of yellow and little specks of green instead of having it be a completely blended color, which can look good too, it just depends. There is that yellow green. Now we're going to create blue-green with this tiny bit of green, I'm not sure if that's going to be enough, but we'll see. I have some green over here if I need it. That looks like it might be fine. Blue-green is probably one of my very favorite colors, also known in some parts as turquoise. I don't have a whole lot here, so it looks lighter, but you get the picture. There's my blue-green. Now, I'm going to do blue violet. I'll do it on this one. There's a lot of purple here, so I'm going to load up on blue and just add it to this palette, to this little wheel and we'll see, yeah, that's perfect. To get my blue violet here. That might be a little bit more blue than violent, but that's okay and finish this off with red violet. This is last one. If you're doing this along with me, good for you. I know this is taking a long time, but exploring these colors, I think it's fun. I'm adding a little bit of red to this violet to get this nice, gorgeous red, violet. Red violet is also one of my favorite colors to use. It's just so pretty. We have successfully created a color wheel, where we have our primary colors. I'm going to say primary, primary, primary, and we have our secondary colors, secondary, secondary, secondary, and then here are our tertiary colors, tertiary, tertiary, tertiary, tertiary. There are two concepts within the color wheel that I want to finish up with before we move on. One, is whatever slice is directly opposite, my color wheel is slightly off in terms of measurements, but whatever slice is directly opposite a hue is its complimentary color and that's spelled with an E, not an I in complementary. The important thing to remember with complementary colors is if you mix them directly together, you will create brown. You will create a gross, muddy mess. You don't really want them to mix exactly together. I can demonstrate that a little bit later on, but complimentary colors can look good together if you pad them with the colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. That's something that you can experiment with, but for our purposes and to achieve the sure-fire way that I talked about of coming up with the perfect color scheme, you want to create an analogous color scheme. Analogous means, using colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. Usually it means any three colors that are next to each other. Just any colors that are next to each other on the color wheel are going to look really good together. If you used red violet and red, and red orange, those would look good together. If you used red and even if you skipped some of these colors, like if you did red, orange, and yellow, those would look good together because as soon as red and orange mixed together, you'd create red orange. Really the key is to stick close together on the color wheel, pick a section on the color wheel like a third of the pie, and if you use those colors and that third of the pie in your galaxy, it'll look great, especially when you have a backdrop of black along with it. That is the color theory class. Just before I do that actually, I really quickly want to show you what happens when you do mix complimentary colors in case you don't believe me, I'm sure you do, but just in case you don't. One of the most common I think, complementary color schemes is blue and orange. I have some, this is like yellow, orange right here, but I'm going to add a little bit more red to it to make it slightly more orange. But here's some orange, if I mix blue with it. See what happens in the middle here? I put way too much blue in it, but when I mix these colors together, it doesn't create a nice, beautiful shade, it's like a brown, muddy mess. As opposed to when you mix these colors together, which we've done all along. Let's say I mix some red violet with this blue violet. That looks beautiful. The shades in the middle, the hues that we're creating in the middle are along the color spectrum that already we know is pleasing. As opposed to this just creates something that looks gross. That's why for this beginner's class, do analogous, again, that term is analogous color schemes, which means colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. I think this video is long enough. I hope this was helpful. Let's move on to which watercolor techniques that we're going to use to have successful galaxies in the next video. See you there. 4. Techniques: All right, this video is going to be just a quick overview of the basic techniques that we're going to use in this galaxy class. They are techniques that you may have used before if you've done watercolor before, but if not, they may be new to you, which is totally fine. The techniques we are going to be using are called wet-on-wet technique and wet-on-dry. Basically that just means between the watercolor that you're using and your paper, how much wetness you're going to be using. wet-on-wet as you may be able to glean, is when the paper is already wet and you're putting your wet watercolor paint on the wet paper. I'm just going to demonstrate a little bit. I've put some clean water, when you use wet-on-wet technique, if you're wetting the paper before hand, sometimes it also means putting more paint on paint that's on the paper, but other times it means putting water down first. You always want it to be clean water or else you're going to get some shade. It's like adding color to the paper instead of water. As you can see, once I put the paint down on this wet paper, it blooms out like this. Using the wet-on-wet technique is really nice when you're trying to mix colors together for galaxies, because you don't have to do as much manipulation with the colors. They just blend together on their own. You do still have to, as you'll see as we create our galaxies later on in the class, you do still have to do some of this yourself, but wet-on-wet is a really important technique to use and to remember in the galaxy class. Mostly because water is your best friend when it comes to creating beautiful, swirling, cloudy-like realistic, I don't know how exactly how realistic, but to create that galaxy effect where you just have colors that are pluming together like clouds of color. Water is the way that you're going to be able to achieve that and we're going to talk about that more as we create our galaxies. But along those lines, because water is the way that you are going to get these colors to blend together so seamlessly, you need to work quickly and that is also something I'm going to repeat over and over again [LAUGHTER]. In order to be really successful at these galaxies, you need to learn how to spot any dry spots and move quickly to put the colors where you want them to go. That can take some practice so don't be discouraged if you are practicing these galaxies and it just isn't coming out exactly the way that you want to because any art takes practice. This course should just be a jump start and teaching you the basic techniques that you need to have effective practice sessions. The second technique that we're going to talk about, and I have a whole video on for the galaxy, like to create a galaxy using this technique is wet-on-dry and wet-on-dry means that your watercolor paint is wet because it always is, but the paper is dry. The reason that I like this technique for galaxies, it might not make that much sense to you, but the reason I like it is because it doesn't get as much unnecessary wetness on the paper which can save your paper. That's something that we're going to talk about. I talked a little bit about the difference between student grade and professional grade watercolor paper is how much wetness it can hold without buckling the paper. No matter what paper you use, it's always going to buckle a little bit. I get lots of questions on my videos on my Instagram that are like, how do you get your paper not to buckle? That's just an illusion [LAUGHTER]. My paper always buckles at least a little bit. But if you use the wet-on-dry technique, because you're not already wetting the paper before hand, you're using less water. I found that I can get very similar techniques using less water by using the wet-on-dry technique, but you have to move quickly. You have to move a lot more quickly than if you're using the wet-on-wet technique at first. I was demonstrating it a little bit where I just like using wet-on-dry. It creates these really crisp lines. But we don't want crisp lines when we do galaxies, we want these blurry lines. What it means by using wet-on-dry for galaxies is you do these paint strokes like this, but then you move really quickly to either get more paint or water to make the lines go away, and you're just adding on these cloudiness, on these water paint clouds to continue mixing the colors together. That's basically what you're doing the whole time for the galaxy, just over and over and over again. You're going to see that in the later videos when we make our own. Those are the techniques that are going to make you successful in creating these galaxies. I have two videos using different versions of wet-on-wet technique and I have one video for the wet-on-dry technique just showing you. Then as we go through the final project together, I will be using the wet-on-dry technique on professional watercolor paper. That is that for now and I will see you in the next video. 5. Watercolor galaxy: Method one: Welcome to the first wet-on-wet technique Galaxy video, [NOISE] where we are going to practice one of the three techniques that I use to create galaxies and this is Version 1 of the wet-on-wet technique. You'll see I have a small piece of paper and if you watched the last video on techniques, I recommended focusing on maybe a smaller piece of paper at first because you have less ground to cover to focus on, because you want to make sure that your paper is wet to get the cloudy technique that we're looking for. I have taped it down because this is student-grade paper which I'm using just for practice. This is Canson XL student-grade watercolor paper and I've taped it down so that, A, I can get some nice borders here when I take off the tape, and B, this student-grade watercolor paper isn't always the best at holding water but when I tape it down it does a much better job, so that's why I did that. Step 1 of this wet-on-wet technique is to get clean water, take your number 10 brush, load it up with clean water and just put that down on the paper. This is another reason why it's smart to start out with a smaller piece of paper because there's less to get wet, and when you do big often even when you're just starting on this first step of wetting down the paper, some parts of the paper can dry already and that makes life harder for us. Not impossible, just harder. On my small piece of paper, I am wetting it completely but not too much. You don't want there to be pools of water, and that's why for all of these next videos you want to have your Q-tips on hand in case you have to mop up some water. I have wet my paper and I've gone ahead and as we talked about in color theory, you should select maybe the three colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. I'm using my Schmincke paints this time and I am going to use red and yellow, or yellow-orange and red-orange are the colors I'm going to use and then black is going to fill in the space. First, I'm going to start with my lightest color. This is already wet, so I just have to watch it pool and you don't need to always have tons of pigment because the coolest part about galaxies I think are how sometimes the light pigment can show underneath. I'm putting down some of this yellow and then I washed off that pigment in my water and so now my brush doesn't have any pigment on it, I just have water so that I can move this around a little bit. You'll notice I tried to move this paint up here and it's already dry up here. If that happens, just get it wet again. I have some random here and here. Next, I am going to use the next darkest color, which is my yellow-orangey color. With the wet-on-wet technique, wherever you put it down, it should bloom outward but you'll see again, it happened in this corner that the water already dried. If you see the water already drying, you want to act quickly to put more water on it because if the paint dries on the dry paper, you can get those pesky paint lines that we don't want that we were talking about. Basically, with the wet-on-wet technique, and this is honestly the technique for all of them, you're just constantly re-wetting the paper really quickly and then putting the colors that you want. Next I'm using this red-orange. The really cool part about using colors that are next to each other on the color wheel is you don't have to worry about whether or not the colors will go with each other once you put them down on the paper. Sometimes when you use lots of different colors and galaxies, you have to really be smart about where you put the colors together and how you place them together because you could accidentally put two colors together that do not match. You could get that gross, muddy color that we talked about in the color theory class, and we don't want that. That's why I'd recommend when you're just beginning using colors that you know already will work really well together. As you can see, I am partly adding more pigment, partly taking it off my brush and using clean water to move it around. I wish I could say there's an exact science to how to do that with galaxies, but there really isn't. That's why I think they're so fun because you're moving color around on the paper is what you're doing. Then once you put black down, which we'll do in just a second, it brings it all together. One thing to note, when you do the method that I use on almost all of my galaxies which is put the pigment down then take it off and use water to move it around, is the vibrancy in some of the places of the pigment can get diluted a little bit because you're changing the value. When you add water to watercolor, it changes the value. A way to fix that is to just add more pigment. Layering in galaxies is so important because if you only do one layer of pigment and you only put down the one part and then nothing else, you're going to get a very light galaxy [LAUGHTER] that's maybe not exactly what you want. I am putting down more in some places and some places I want to be a little bit lighter, so I'm moving it around. At some point, you can go overboard, and when you feel like maybe you're going overboard, that's when you start putting in the black because it's going to take a lot of manipulation when you're putting the black too. I'm going to move on to that, I've got a nice mix of colors here. You have to be careful when you have the 10 brush because it can get a lot of water, and the black you want to be very black. You want to take off other pigments that you had, dip it in the water to get it clean, and then make sure to just push your brush against the side of the cup a couple of times to get a lot of the water out. I'm putting in black now. First, I'm going to go around the edges and I'm going very fast because once I'm done going around the edges, I'm going to want to manipulate it. Again, push the paint around so it's not just in a square because that's not exactly the way the galaxies look, they look chaotic and random and spaces intruding everywhere. That's not the vibe you get when it's just in a square like this. But the key part is to get the paint down. [NOISE] Now, we're going to use a combination of using a clean brush with water and then adding more pigment to achieve the look we want. I'm going to start just moving some of the black, and sometimes we're going to be moving the black outward and blending them together, moving the black inward. Sometimes we're going to put more colorful pigment on and I'll show you how to do that in just a second. We're just moving some of this in here. [NOISE] The paper's already buckling a lot. If you have student grade paper and it buckles a lot, that was supposed to happen. [LAUGHTER] But you can still make it work. That's why we have the tape. I have some dry spots in here, I've noticed, so I'm going to just mix this together because we don't want any of the dry spots to show, we want it to look seamless. Sometimes you can make galaxies and utilize dry lines in a very clever way, but for these basic ones, I just want to try to get rid of them. Here's an example. In some places, my paint is pooling a little bit and that is not good on the pipe paper and it's not good for the effect that we want to achieve. Now I have the black and it's mixed in, but I'm not quite done yet because now, my galaxy looks a little bit gray, and I want it to pop out a little bit more, so I'm going to add more of this pigment that I have. I'm just tapping it on. But be careful of having too much water like we talked about because the more water you add to this, the more it's going to buckle. That's the tricky part. Honestly, with all galaxies is knowing how much water to add and how much not to add. I'm just adding a lot of really stark pigment here. Here's some more of this. Then I'm going to go and mix it together in a second. I have some pooling right here. I don't like that. Pooling happens when you have too much water, which is what we've talked about in the past. I'm just adding some more color here, and more down here. You don't have to keep them in the same spots. You can put color anywhere you want. I didn't have yellow down here before, but I'm going to put some down here right now anyway. Now, I've taken the pigment off my brush, so I have some clean water on my brush. I'm just going to move this pigment around a little bit more. Creating galaxies is a lot of putting down pigment, moving it around, putting water on it so that it doesn't look so stark, and basically doing that for several minutes. But that's why it can be so fun and cathartic to make these galaxies because it's just doing this same process over and over again. I don't want dried lines, this looks decent to me. Now I'm going to put a little bit more black so the contrast is darker. Wherever I see water pooling, I'm going to just mop that right up. With the black, I'm being careful not to have too much water on my brush because I want it to be really dark pigment, I don't want to add tons of water to the paper. I just want to add some more black so that we have more of a contrast here. Then after I add it, I will do what I did before, which is move it together manually with my brush, manipulate the paint. [NOISE] I've added some black and I'm almost done, I just want to move the paint a little bit so that it blends together, so it's not quite black then pigment. Almost done. Sometimes the black doesn't have to just stay in the corner, sometimes it can go inward like this. That is the first wet on wet technique for a galaxy. Honestly, right now you might look at it and say, I'm not really sure this is what I wanted it to look like, [LAUGHTER] but once you add the stars, it's going to look very cool. I would recommend either waiting for this to dry or using an embossing heat tool to dry it yourself, and then setting it aside because we're going to need it again when we do the stars. In some upcoming videos, I have three techniques for stars as well, which we're going to talk about later on. I will say that for one of the stars techniques, the video labeled twinkling stars, you're going to need your galaxy to be wet when you first do them. If this is the one that you want to practice twinkling stars on, then maybe jump ahead to that video right now. But if not, you can set this aside and wait for it to dry and decide which one that you want to be it. I'm probably going to do the twinkling stars on the wet on dry galaxy technique that I'll do, which is the third one that I'm going to talk about. But just a heads up that at least one of these galaxies, for the twinkling stars technique, you'll need the galaxy to be wet. Once we start the technique, I'll tell you that you can re-wet the paper and it should be okay, but if you want to move ahead and do it right now, that works for me. Without further ado, let's move on to the second wet on wet technique. 6. Watercolor galaxy: Method two: All right, welcome to the second wet-on-wet technique for our galaxies. In our last video, we talked about how to tape down your paper and wet it down first and then start putting on pigment and colors and mixing your colors together that way and having the paper-based stationary. This time I'm going to talk about a different kind of wet-on-wet technique that I've used that can be a lot of fun. I've already gone ahead and for this galaxy, I'm going to use combinations of red and blue, and I'm going to use Winsor & Newton this time. I already went ahead and created in my blank palette a red-violet and a blue-violet. These are both purple, but one has a little bit more indigo and the other has a little bit more Winsor red deep. That's techniques that we learned in the color theory videos. If you haven't watched that and you are curious about what I'm talking about, go ahead and watch that video. But for now, this is what I'm going to be using. Then I'm also going to be using black for the outer edges. First things first we know that for wet-on-wet, your paper has to be wet. I'm going to get my paper wet. I don't have tape this time, so I'm just going to use broad strokes like this. I'm not going to worry about if they are in line with each other because I like doing this technique when it looks like you're painting a galaxy almost toward the end. I've done it this way a few times and I'll show you what I mean. Because I'm using a slightly bigger paper, I was going to say maybe you don't always have to go down to the bottom with your water, but I'm going to go down close to the bottom anyway. For this technique, you do want to have slightly more water, but you still don't want it to pool. We're going to be careful to watch for that. But we don't want it to be taped down because we're going to physically move the paper to move the watercolor and I'm going to show you what I mean in just a second. I'm going to put down, instead of doing it like going like this, you can do that, but I'm also going to do in some lines like this, I'm just going to put down the pigment, the red and the blue in some pigment like this. We want to have a little bit more water because we want to be able to travel and I'll show you what I mean once I put down a few more. I'm going to put some blue-violet up here, and some red-violet down in here, and maybe over here. We're putting down a lot of pigment. Similar to the last one, if you see that the paper is starting to get dry in places, just get it wet because that is how it's going to travel and I'm going to show you in just one second what I mean by that. One thing to note, usually we want to pick up pools of water right away, but this time we don't. I'm going to show you why. Because in order to get the colors to blend together, you're going to physically lift up the paper and move the colors around and just watch them go all over the place. In order to get the kind of light spots that we like, you do want to leave some white so you don't want the paper to be completely covered with pigment. Hopefully, you can see what I'm doing here. I am just moving this up and down and from side to side. The trick is to see if there are any pools of water. You want to move the paper so gravity does its thing. We're going to do this a few more times, but see how they're already mixing together. This is a really fun way to do it. I'm just going to keep doing what I did. I'm going to put down a little bit more pigments. Some red-violet, some blue, also some red and blue up here. You'll notice that as the colors mix together, like when red and blue mix together, they're just naturally going to make some more violet , but we like that. Maybe a little bit more blue over here. Now I'm going to go again. Just lifting it up and down, side to side. You want to be careful if you have too much pigment pooling on the side and you hold it down for too long sometimes it will escape the confines of your brushstrokes and leak onto the table and create a drip of paint on the side which can look cool, but if you don't want to get paint on your table, then just be really careful to see how it's pooling right here. That's when I want to turn it back around and have it go from side to side and hopefully you can see this pretty well. I'm just moving it up and down over and over again until the pigment and the water goes in different places. There are some places that are a little dry, so I'm going to just re-wet them really quick with clean water. You want to make sure to always do that with clean water. Another cool thing that you can do right now before we put the black in. If you put down clean water just like this in drops, it blooms out and creates a cool cloudy effect. I like to do that sometimes. You can do this with any galaxy honestly. But I'm showing it to you this time. It doesn't have to just be with this version of wet-on-wet. Doing that also can help create the super blending effect that we want. Now, I'm going to put in the black. Once I've put in the black, we do the exact same thing. I'm going to put the black and on the edges and you can even create new paint strokes if that's easier. Just putting in this black right here. Honestly, you don't have to necessarily use black, sometimes for my galaxies it just has to be dark. I've used Payne's gray before which is a dark blue almost gray. You can use gray if you want. It would just have to be darker than the colors you're using. I've also used a dark purple before. For this basic class I'm just doing the basics which is black and then these colors. But if you want to experiment, go for it. In future classes, I'm going to talk about more tricky color combos for galaxies as well, but for this class, we're just doing the basics. I already love this. This red and blue galaxy, I think it looks so cool. I will leave when they will look even cooler. Before I move on, you're noticing me right now seeing where the paint is drying and I don't want it to be dry. I want it to not be dry. Before I continue, I'm just blending it together. You might notice that the paint is pooling as well especially when I'm adding more and more water. We especially want to be careful with water dripping onto the table and creating unwanted paint drips on this galaxy. We're almost done adding black. We might do another layer of black after we do our twirling around thing, but first before we twirl it around again, dry spots. You can usually tell what parts are dry because if you can see reflection, they're wet and if you can't like on the light, then they're probably dry. I'm twisting my head, you can't see, but I'm twisting my head to check. Then I noticed that this has gotten a little light, I'm just going to put a little bit more pigment here as well to go with the black. We'll see how that goes. Yeah, let's go. I'm being careful of pooling, and with black, you want to be careful not to let it overpower as well because obviously it's much darker. When you're in space, you want the black to be prevalent for sure, but you don't want it to completely overtake all of the colors. Sometimes that means if you notice the black is just going everywhere, then turning it again so it doesn't, maybe doing a little sideways action. Sometimes there's lots of pigment, but it doesn't have as much water and so it takes a little bit more time to come down. I'm going to do here is get a clean brush, but take off water. I don't want to add more water and I'm going to manually move this black around. It's okay to do a combination of the tilting it and then also manually moving it like we did in the other video. Some of this up here is a little dry. Notice how this is a stark line, it's not blurry, it's not blooming out that means this part is dry. I'm just going to get it wet. I know that this part is more dry because these paint strokes that I made aren't blooming quite as much as I expected them to. I'm just taking my clean paintbrush, and mixing these colors together to get the cloudy effect that we want with these galaxies. Down here it's gotten a little bit dry, honestly, I think I might be just about done. I might add a little bit more black on the bottom here because I can see some of the blue peeking through. I'm just going to add a little bit more black here to make it a little bit darker. I don't want it to stay in line though, so I'm just moving the paint, moving it out. I also don't want it to be literal like dense droplets like this of pigments. I'm taking water and just blooming it out. This just takes some experimenting too honestly. Here's a tiny little dry spot, weird when that happens. I'm taking clean water, I want it to still be lighter. I'm taking clean water and just pushing it out. That's the tricky thing with galaxies is you don't want everything to be dark, you want some light spots. The way to achieve that is to make sure you have a clean brush and clean water and pushing out from the white spot if that makes sense. I'm just blending things together like that. That got a little dry. Just fine. Honestly, this is not to clean up the line I don't want that clean up the line, but other than that, I think I'm just about done. I think this looks pretty good. Right now I'm just like scouring for lines of the paint that don't look quite like a blooming cloud thing. That look more like a line than I want , but I think we're good. Like I mentioned in the other video, you can either wait for this to dry or you can use this one to practice the twinkling stars. Whatever you do is totally up to you, but for the twinkling stars video where we talk about how to create stars that look like they're twinkling, you need to have a wet galaxy. If you miss this instruction and all of your galaxies are dry by the time you get to there, no worries, we can re-wet it and it'll be fine, but it would be easier if your galaxy was already wet. That's up to you. I initially was going to use my wet-on-dry version, but I'm actually might use this one for the twinkling stars. No matter what video you move on to next, I will see you soon, but this was the second version of wet-on-wet where we got it wet and we let gravity do its thing so that the watercolors could mix together like that. That's one of my favorite ways to do it. See you soon. 7. Watercolor galaxy: Method three: Welcome to our final technique for creating galaxies, which is wet-on-dry. We already did two different versions of wet-on-wet. Now I'm going to teach you how I do wet-on-dry. This is honestly probably the technique I use the most. It's not that different from the first wet-on-wet technique. I just find if you've practiced and you know you can go fast, this is a good way to control the pigment without getting too much water on your paper. That's probably the upside to using the wet-on-dry technique. You're not using as much water because you're not already wetting the paper. I'm going to use my Schmincke paint again. [NOISE] We did red-blue, we did red-yellows. Now I'm going to do yellow-blue for this combo. Here's my yellowish-green, here's my bluish-green. Let's get going. First, like before, for the first wet-on-wet technique, I'm going to start with some yellow and I'm just going to paint it out like this. Now remember what we talked about, we don't want lines. You have to empty your brush really fast and create a mock wet-on-wet technique by starting the water on the side and then pushing it into the pigment. Now again, we have to go very fast. As you can see, once the pigment is in the water, it will begin to dry. This technique requires a lot of already knowing exactly what colors you want and moving very quickly to put them together. That's why I would recommend getting your colors together before and deciding what colors you want before you get started. [NOISE] I'm just going to continue to paint here. It's already started to dry in the middle. I'm going to re-wet it like we've done in the past. See, by me moving some of that pigment, I made some of the yellow a little bit more green than I wanted. I'm going to start out with some clean water in the middle of this dry yellow and move outward because when you start with blue and go inward to the yellow, you're going to create some green. [LAUGHTER] Already, I'm worried about that but it's okay. It's where black's going to be, but do you see this? I'm pretty sure this is a line that's going to be hard to get rid of. Putting some more blue-green up here and [NOISE] putting some more light green over here. [NOISE] I'm going to put some more blue. Sorry we're not talking very much. [LAUGHTER] This is definitely the trickiest technique because as I said, you have to move very quickly. I'm just adding more pigment. As you can see, all of these techniques are very similar in that you just need to make sure that things stay wet and add more pigment when they inevitably get diluted. [NOISE] I want this to be a little bit more blended in with the yellow. I want the blue to be a little bit more blended in with the yellow right here but this looks pretty good. Now I'm going to add some black. But first I'm going to take away some of the pooling parts using my trusty Q-tip. Actually, I think I want some more blue-green, so I'm going to add a little bit more blue to this palette of blue-green that I have, even though it is still not quite the blue-green I was looking for. There we go. That's a little bit more what I was hoping for but now it's starting to pool right here. You can tell because it's not mixing evenly with the color. It's putting some of the color on top of each other, if that makes sense. [LAUGHTER] It's hard to explain unless you've seen it, but you can tell something's starting to pool if it's almost like there are little flecks of yellow floating in this blue pool as opposed to them just blending evenly together. We don't want that. That's not something that we want. I'm going to add black in just a second here. First, I'm going to add a little bit more yellow because I have created a bunch of green. Mix those two together a little bit better. Now I think we're okay to add some black. I'm going to take my black and go around the edges. Basically the exact same process. From here on out, it's basically the exact same process as the first wet-on-wet technique, where we're adding black along the edges and then we're going to manipulate it so that it blends in more evenly with the colors. This is why I said it was trickier because it dries faster. That's another reason why professional watercolor paper is better for stuff like this actually, because it doesn't dry as fast. At least not in the way that you want it to. [LAUGHTER] It's easier to work with. We'll see that when I do the wet-on-wet technique. I'm going to do the wet-on-dry technique for my final version, for the final project, but we'll be able to see the difference there. Professional watercolor paper also makes the colors just a little bit brighter and they stay more true to their they're supposed to look like as opposed to they can look diluted and muted on student grade watercolor paper unfortunately. But it still looks beautiful. Professional watercolor paper, it can be pretty pricey. It was years of me doing watercolor before I finally made the plunge to get professional watercolor paper but it does make a big difference, I will say that. It's worth it to me and my business and how I teach. But for people just learning, you could easily learn these techniques using student grade. [NOISE] I'm getting some lines right here. They look cool. Something that we'll talk about in a more advanced galaxy class is how to use dried lines strategically. But for now, I want to see if I can get rid of them mostly so they just look like shaded parts. [LAUGHTER] I'm trying not to put too much water on this but sometimes it's tricky. Pool, go away. [NOISE] This green up here looks muddy, so I'm going to add a little bit of yellow to it to see if that helps brighten it up a bit. But see, I've added lots more water than I intended right there. I might need to pool it up in a second, but I'm going to just blend this yellow in. Now it's still turning greenish, but at least it's not quite so muddy as it was before. [NOISE] Then I'm going to add a little bit of some blue-green up here. I think I'm just about done with this one. With galaxies, you can easily go for so long. But you have to remember that, especially if you're using student grade watercolor paper, the more water you put on it, the more it's going to damage the paper and make it warped. At some point, you do have to call it and say, "No, this is pretty good. We can end here." I'm just getting rid of some dried spots right there. I might just put a little bit more black, but I'm trying not to put water, just pigment on this black down here. Then I took off a lot of water, so I can just blend it like this. That looks pretty good. [NOISE] Here is the wet-on-dry technique. Very similar to the first wet-on-wet technique but we don't start with a wet paper. But the end result is pretty similar. Now let's move on to stars. The first technique is going to be the one that I've used most often in any time that I make skies or stars or [NOISE] what have you. There are three different techniques for stars, and I would recommend you are using the three different galaxies [LAUGHTER] that we just created for the different ones. One of them will have to be wet for the twinkling stars version. If you want to use this galaxy for the twinkling stars tutorial, then I would recommend skipping the splatter at first and then moving on to the twinkling stars. But you can always re-wet one of your projects if you really need to do the twinkling stars. We just need to have a wet background for that one. But for splatter, they can totally be dry. What I'm going to do here is dry this. You can either dry with a heat tool or whatever you have or just let it air dry but I'm going to dry this and then we're going to move onto the stars technique. Can't wait to see you there. [NOISE] 8. Scattered stars: Welcome to the first video where we talk about how to create stars. I have taken my first galaxy, which I created this using the wet-on-wet technique. It is dried already. I'm going to use this to show you how to create stars. This is called the splatter method. Basically, it is exactly what it sounds. We're going to take paint. You can either use white gouache or Dr. Martin's Bleedproof White or any kind of opaque white paint that you have. We're just going to splatter it all over this thing. [LAUGHTER] One of the questions I get most often is how do you create your splatter stars without making a huge mess? The answer is, I don't. [LAUGHTER] I always make a huge mess when I do splatter stars. Be prepared to either wipe down your table or if you, like me, have a partner who does not like having mess on your nice desk, then get something to put underneath your galaxy. That could be a big piece of paper, [NOISE] or, like me, I have this tray [LAUGHTER] that we got [NOISE] specifically, so I could do these splatter galaxies. To splatter stars. I have this tray, as you can see, it already has lots of splatter marks on it. Sometimes I don't always use this tray, but I immediately wipe up the stars if I don't because this kind of paint, I don't think it's going to stain, but better safe than sorry, it does get hard. You want to wipe it up ASAP if you don't have something like this. But once we have that, you need to get out your paint. I like to use Dr. Ph. Martin's Bleedproof White [NOISE] and I like to use the lid as a pallet. Dr. Ph. Martin's Bleedproof White is pretty thick. Get some of your paint, and it's going to be thick. Gouache is pretty thick too. You'll probably want to dilute it with water, which is what I'm doing right now. I'm diluting it with clean water. You want to make sure it has clean water, otherwise, you're going to turn the paint to whatever color your water was, [LAUGHTER] which is not the color that we want our stars to be. I'm using my size zero paintbrush, but you can use a little bit bigger if you want. The trick with stars is you don't want the paint to be too runny. Otherwise, when you flick it on, it's going to look more like snow than stars. I can show you on this palette. I'm going to put lots of water in this just to demonstrate to you how it turns into snow. If I have lots of water if this is really runny, and I flick it, do you see how big those circles are? When compared to our tiny galaxy, those can look bigger than we want our stars to be. You want to find the sweet spot where your paint is thin enough that it actually comes off the brush. If it's too thick, then it won't come off. But also so that it's thick enough that your stars are the right size. I would honestly recommend testing it out, not on your final piece. We use these as practice pieces before our final one. You can use this as practice too to practice flattering paint. It just takes some experimenting. Number 1, you don't want to have too much water. Number 2, similar on that vein, you don't want to have too much paint on your paintbrush. Because if you load up on paint, [NOISE] the chances are, that paint is going to come off really easily and create, again, stars that are too big. Once you feel like you have the right amount, you just go ahead and [NOISE] splatter. Some people use toothbrushes to do this. They'll dip like an old toothbrush in the paint and flick it. [NOISE] I find that creates way more of a mess and doesn't always yield the results you want, and it gives you tons of stars right away, that's for sure. But I like doing it this way. You can also use a bigger paintbrush, that will get you more stars right off the bat. But with a bigger paintbrush, you have to worry a lot more about how much paint you have on there and how thick the paint is, because the bigger the paintbrush, the huge stars are, if you have too much water. I want a low bit more stars. I'm going to just take a little bit more paint and a little bit more water to create this consistency that I want, [NOISE] and I'm going to go to town. I just do this a lot. If you see me on Instagram and ever seen my videos, I'm sure it seems like this takes two seconds, but that's because my videos are sped up, [LAUGHTER] very a lot. [LAUGHTER] Usually it takes anywhere between five and 10 dips back into the paint to get the amount of stars, especially for space to get the amount of stars that I like. I like to have a lot of stars. I don't like to have a lot of mess though, which is why I don't use a toothbrush. [LAUGHTER] But you're welcome to try it. I just don't have a tutorial for it in this class. That's it. That is the first method for creating stars. That is the splatter method. In my opinion, putting the stars on the galaxy makes the whole galaxy, and it makes it look so cool. Finished product Number one. The other methods that we're going to talk about, which is the twinkling star method and then using the gel pen. Often I combine with this flattering of the stars, so keep that in mind if you want to use all three methods in one place, you totally can. For the twinkling stars method, you need a wet galaxy. I would not recommend using this particular galaxy to test out the twinkling stars. I recommended in my other videos either moving straight ahead to that one or re-wetting the galaxy. You can do this method after you've made the twinkling stars. But anyway, I'm going to talk about that in the final project. Either way, this is splattering stars and I just love it. [LAUGHTER] Good work and see you on the next video. 9. Twinkling stars: Welcome to the twinkling stars video. In our previous stars video, we learned how to splatter the stars, to get what we want. Now I'm going to show you to get some randomized stars, and now I'm going to show you how to get stars that look like they're twinkling. As I mentioned in other videos before, in order for this method to work, you need your galaxy to be wet. I'm re-wetting parts of mine. If it's not wet, if your galaxies have already dried, that is okay. You just have to re-wet them and be careful you have to use clean water. Usually you have to use clean water for one stroke and then re-clean your brush for the next stroke because otherwise, once you put your brush down to move the paint, to put water on it, you pick up pigments just automatically. We don't want to muddy the galaxy, we just want to make sure that it's wet. Like I said in the materials video, you can either use gouache which is opaque watercolor paint, or you can use Dr. Ph. Martin's bleed proof white, which is honestly very similar to gouache. I'm going to use bleed proof white first. Bleed proof white is very thick and pasty, so I like to use the lid like a palette and get some of this paint on here, and then get a little bit of clean water to make it a little bit more like paint and just mix it in there to dilute it. I'm using my round 0 brush right now. I am taking some of those bleed proof white paint. I know that my galaxy is wet, so I'm just going to put some white paint in a few places. Now these twinkling stars you don't want everywhere. Night skies and galaxies look awesome when they have a few twinkling stars. What we're doing right now is putting down the base of the star. Then we're going to dry this and make the little lines that'll make the star bloom out. But to make it look like it's twinkling, it has to be surrounded by a glow of light. What we're doing is creating a glow of light and I have found that it looks more realistic and more twinkly, if it's not a solid circle. If you have this white, that blends in with the galaxy already, then it looks more like light to me. What I'm doing, I put down the white and now I'm mixing it with the galaxy with water. You don't have to do that with all of them but I'm just going to show you what that looks like. I'm loading my 0 brush with clean water every time, because this paint is white. If you don't clean your water every time, you're going to make the white paint look not so white anymore. It looks like down here it already dried a little bit, so that's frustrating. But teaching moment, if the galaxy has already dried where you put down the white paint, you don't start where the white paint is, you start where the wet is and you go into the paint that way, because if you start where the paint is, you're just going to keep spreading the white paint, so it gets bigger and bigger. But what you want is the white pant to bloom out like this, to make it look like light. The way that you do that is by creating the wet space again. Because I got that wet again, I'm just going to re-wet this really quick, great. Now, last touch before we dry this and paint the star part is, you want to load your brush up with a little bit more white so that the center of these stars that are blooming out our white. Because when you use the water to blend them into the galaxy, you diluted the whiteness just a little bit. For this one, I'm going to make the white be like a star shape already. Don't always have to do that, but it can help. That looks good to me. This is not perfect. This is not an exact science. I've been doing this technique for several weeks now and [LAUGHTER] sometimes I still get them looking not like exactly I want to. But those were the twinkling stars we're going to do for now. I usually like to do an odd number, so I'm going to do just one little one right there, just because I like to have an odd number. [LAUGHTER] Weird but it's what it is. [NOISE] Now I'm going to dry this. We're using my dryer. You can wait for it to dry on its own, but I'm going to dry it. If you want to stop listening for the next 30 seconds, that works for me, but I'm going to start it now and continue talking if you can hear me. [NOISE] I like to use the dryer instead of waiting for it to dry because I don't always have time to wait for it to dry. Sometimes when you use the dryer like this, you can even out the paper. Just make sure the edges are probably going to be what's the most wet right now, the edges are flat. Don't be in one spot for too long when you're drying, because otherwise you might burn the paper and that is not what we want. You'll probably start to smell it [LAUGHTER] if that happens. Pooling is also something we want to avoid when we first do the galaxies because trying to dry a pool of water, this way actually creates dry spots, but you don't always want. Looks like ours are turning out okay. Just about done. I like to do the front and also the back. You can't see my desk maybe right now, but there is a lot of water on the back. The water just seeps through the paper because they put so much on it. To make galaxies you have to put so much water on. Still a little bit damp. It might seem like it's dry but usually it's still damp. Stays damp for a while. I think we're just about done. This is student grade watercolor paper, as I mentioned before, for these practice 1, as we're just practicing these techniques. I'm going to use professional water color paper for the final project. But it's almost always going to buckle no matter what you do, if you do galaxies like this, so sometimes when it's dry, I just bend it back into place and that usually works pretty well. The next step to finish off these twinkling stars is to get your paint again and your number 0 brush. If you've run out of paint, maybe put some more on there. I have some of this really thick paint that I'm putting on my lid which is acting as a pallet and then I'm just adding some water to it to make it more painty. Last, the next step we're going to create very thin lines right here that will look like the stars twinkling. But to do that, we do not want a lot of paint on our brush. If you see how thick the brush is with the paint, you can usually tell if it has too much paint on it. We want to be able to see the tip of the paintbrush really well. The way that I get rid of the paint is I load it with some paint and then just on the side, I very carefully make some strokes to get some of the paint off. Now we have some paint on here and we want to put very little pressure. We want to create very thin lines. So I'm just going to put very thin lines. If you have an even smaller brush than 0, that would work just as well. That would probably work better, but we're going to go with 0 for right now. I'm painting very thin lines in the middle. You can either do just like a simple cross or you can do two crosses to get a star that shines like that. That's what we're doing for all of these stars. Obviously, some of them are bigger than others. For this one I'm going to do the full thing. Those are two twinkling stars, down here I'm going to do the same thing, two crosses. They don't always have to be upright like this. They can be twinkling in a different way, a different direction. If you want it to go like this instead, that's up to you, but this is the way that I'm doing it. I'm just creating very thin lines. You want to be careful not to make the lines too long. I did that once and it reminded me of spider legs,. [LAUGHTER] which is not the most pleasant thought when you're creating galaxies, but we are where we are. That is what you do to create twinkling stars. They look like snowflakes. Again, the way that we created the effect of the light blooming out of the star is by using the wet-on-wet technique with the gouache or the bleed proof white to let this white bloom out. Then we created the more concrete star raise on the side with our small paintbrush. [NOISE] My favorite combo is to use these kinds of stars and then after to do the splatter effect that we already learned. [NOISE] That's it. That's how you do twinkling stars. Once you give it a shot, practice it if you weren't already doing it along with me and I cannot wait to see what you come up with. All right, now we're going to go on to the next version of stars, which is, using the gel pen. See you soon. 10. Hand-drawn stars: All right, welcome to the final tutorial on how to create stars. We're using the third galaxy piece that we created for practice. The last way that I know to create stars other than that I'm talking about in this class is to use a white gel pen. You can do this if you prefer it or if you don't have access to gouache or bleedproof white, they can be pricey. A gel pen is a really decent cheaper option. This is a uni-ball signal, white gel pen, and you just want to make sure that whatever white gel pen you get is opaque because you want it to show up. Honestly, what you do is you take the gel pen and you just draw in the stars. This is definitely more time-intensive. Sometimes you have to get it going on your hand or a paper, like normal people. It's a little more time-intensive doing it this way because you're drawing in the individual stars. The reason I prefer to use paint is because at least my mind, I don't know if your mind works this way, [LAUGHTER] but my mind automatically wants to create patterns and put equal space in-between the stars. Stars are not like that. You look up at the stars and it's not like, "Oh, it's a nice little pattern of stars." Real stars look more like the splatter effect where there are random, and chaotic, and some are bigger than others. But I recognize that not everybody can do the splatter technique, that's why this can work just as well. Just bear in mind that your mind will probably want to try to make the stars look like they're in a pattern, and you don't want that if you want the stars to look like they're real. There's only so much you can do. But just if you notice yourself, like putting the same amount of space in-between stars [LAUGHTER], then try to mix it up and be aware of that. You can also do little clusters of stars. Often stars come in clusters. You can do some bigger than others, some big stars, some small ones. With gel pen, if you put only a tiny bit of pressure, you can get smaller stars, but sometimes you get what you get. Not as much control as you have with a brush because the ball on the tip of the pen is whatever width it is. I'm just creating some stars. You can go to town for a long time [LAUGHTER] to get the stars and look that you want on your galaxy. Like I mentioned, this method is definitely more time-intensive, but cheaper. It's whatever you decide is going to work best for you. Do that. Just know the pros and cons and go to town. I'm just creating some stars. I also often use the white gel pen to create other things in the sky that aren't necessarily stars, like a comment or a shooting star. The way that I do that, and I often do that even if I use the splatter method. I'll take my gel pen, and I'm just going to use star that already exists, and make the ball a little bit bigger and then create a line. I'm not drawing a line. I'm more flicking my wrist to give it the illusion of movement. With a gel pen sometimes it creates streaks, and that's okay. We're okay with streaks. [LAUGHTER] Because that also makes it look like it's moving. You can create one, you can do two, like that. Then another way to use the gel pen, if you don't have bleed proof white or gouache, you can create twinkling stars. They won't quite have the effect that the paint did. But the way that you do that is really just by either creating a cross like that, those can be like stars, or you can create a little bit more sophisticated of a cross and have it be a little bit more like a star, like that. It's like you're drawing a diamond. Sometimes I do them next to each other like that. I always like to have an odd number of things like this. Right now we have seven. We have five stars and two comments. About the composition, I'm going to do another comment down here and then maybe a twinkling star right there. This galaxy with doing the stars and the other celestial things in the sky, I don't know if space is called sky, but in space [LAUGHTER] using only the gel pen, it looks a little bit more cartoonish, not quite as realistic. I'm going to make these just a little bit longer. But I think that they still look really cool, and [NOISE] you can do some really fun things with the white gel pen. There you go. That's your tutorial on how to create stars if you do not have opaque white paint. White gel pens are definitely cheaper, and they can create really cool effects. Now, we're going to create our final project. The next step for you is to gather all the materials, and if you have professional watercolor paper, this is the time to use it. I'm going to be using my professional watercolor paper for our final project. Also, you want to pick out whatever colors you want to use. I think I'm going to use blue, green, and yellow for my final project. I really like this combination for space, but any of the other color combos that we've done, just to remind you, here are the three galaxies that we did as practice with red, yellow, and orange, blue, green, and yellow, and red, blue, and purple. Any of these color combinations would be awesome. I would just make sure to prep your mixed colors ahead of time because as we discussed in these practices, you need to go fast with galaxies. You can't spend tons of time mixing your colors together because you haven't done so already. That's what I would do to prep, decide what color combo you want to use, and what different shades of the colors you want to create. I would go ahead and create individual palettes for those right now. You go ahead and do that. I will see you in the next video as we do Step 1 for our final project. [NOISE] Can't wait. 11. Final project: Layer one: We are about to start on layer one of our final project, and for this piece, I am using my Blick Professional Watercolor Block. This is watercolor paper and a block, which just means it's tape-glued together on all sides so it will stay and not buckle as much. Instead of doing those square or rectangular galaxies, I'm going to do a circle galaxy for this final project. This is where you grab the thing that looks like a circle. If you're using a bigger paper, you could use one of those plastic pallets, but I'm using this bowl because the smaller space you have, the more likely it is you'll be able to keep everything wet and doing what you want to do. I'm very lightly going over this circle with a pencil, and so there's my guideline. For this final project, I'm going to do the wet-on-dry technique, which is the technique I use most often lately. In the last video, I decided I'm going to use blue and yellow, and combinations of blue and yellow, so like this green and lighter green, to get that galaxy, and then I'll use black on the edges. To get started, I'm not wetting my paper. Remember, this is wet-on-dry, so I'm going to get some yellow, and I'm going to just put some in the middle here and then take off some of the pigment and get it wet around the edges so that it doesn't dry quite so stark. I am moving very quickly to put more color on the paper, so I'm grabbing some blue over here. You can make them follow a line or you don't have to make them follow a line, they can just go wherever they want. But I want my lines not to exist, my dry, so I'm going to start blending these together. Moving over here, I didn't even pick up the green I'd already prepared, but I've just made it because I still had some blue pigment on here, which is how colors work, so they did their job. I think I've mentioned before, I like to have spots where it's lighter in color, like this white spot here, and always want it so it's so dark so that there's some contrast. I'm just going to town, that's what this layer is all about. You are putting down pigment very quickly and mixing the colors together. We are also going to do the black in this layer in this video, so we'll see how that goes. I'm going to do a little bit of yellow over here. Yellow can be a strong pigment, but it can also get overpowered easily. That's something interesting to note. Put more blue over here. With circle galaxies, honestly with any galaxy, when you use black as space, you don't have to go to the edge with the pigment because black is going to be at the edge. But you do want to make sure that your colors are blending together. I don't really want this line where it look like I had a stroke of paint right here. See how it looks even, I want that to be a little bit more blended together. I've said this before, but it's like we're creating clouds of color within the galaxy. That's how galaxies look like, as if they're like clouds of color together. The way that we do that is by using a lot of water very strategically. I'm just about done with the color, not forever, but I might start adding some black so that we can start blending it in because as we've seen before, you can't just add the black and then you're done, you have to also blend the black in with the colors. First, I'm going to go around very carefully with the black, and I might mess up my perfect circle because I'm a human. But I'm going to try to be on the guidelines as much as possible, and I'm going around. I want to try to get the black to mix with the already wet paint wherever it is. I want the edges of the black, I know I've already gone over past the guidelines, but I want the edges to be the most black. Then the inside can be a little bit lighter like it goes gray or it makes the other colors darker as they mix with black. That looks cool too. [NOISE] By the way, I want the edges to stay black if possible. We've put down some black. Now, I still have some black pigment on here and I want some of the black to be a cloud too because it's not like space and the galaxy part exist separately, they're together. Sometimes there are cloudy parts of space, so are black as well. I'm just blooming that out, but now, even though we know that the paper is wet, it still looks too well-formed. We want them to look like super-blended clouds, like they're just blooming together. I took off some pigment from my brush with my water. If you've been using the same water the whole class, it's probably pretty diluted, so you might want to go get a new cup of freshwater. But you want to get off the pigment from your brush and use just the water to blend these colors together. The middle might be dry, and that's okay, so you just have to rewet it if the middle doesn't look exactly how you want it to. You're like, this is a defined layer and I don't want it to be so defined, I want it to look seamless and they blend together. I keep saying clouds because that's all I can think of to compare it to, but that's what they look like to me. [NOISE] I'm just using my brush to keep doing that, and I'm going to go until I feel like it's good enough. In some places, I might add more pigment, like I think I might add some blue over here. That could look good. I talked about how we want some places to be lighter and to have wider spaces, but others, it's okay to add some pigments so they're not quite as light. [NOISE] Then it's also okay to add more black. If you think that the edges aren't quite black enough, which I might do in a second here. [NOISE] The key is to just make sure there are no lines for this type of galaxy. I'm going to say it over and over again because that's what we're looking for, because it's too easy to stop and have everything dry and then you look at your galaxy again, and there are some lines that you could have easily fixed by adding more water to it before you dried the whole piece. I'm just adding a little bit more black to the edges. Once I've finished adding the black, I'm going to start blending it in again like I did before with a clean brush. I'm going to get rid of the black pigment that was already on my brush and start blending it in so it's more like clouds are coming in on clouds. That's the image that I like to have in my brain when I'm doing this. They're just blending in seamlessly with the sky with the burst of color that you've created with the galaxy. I keep saying sky, I'm not exactly sure if space outside of Earth is classified as sky. I don't think so, but I do also like making galaxy skies, night skies, which will be a different class in the future, specifically for that, but you can use these techniques to try to figure it out on your own as well. That's exactly how I did it. If you use these techniques combined with my night sky class, you could definitely come up with some cool combinations. I might put some more blue-green right here. Like I said, again, I'm just going through and finding the spots where I think they're not quite blended enough the way that I want them to be, and blending them manually so that they look exactly how, and I shouldn't say exactly because this is not an exact science. This is you being a judge and figuring out when to stop and when to keep going. It's not going to be perfect, but when was art ever been. No matter what, I think it's going to be beautiful. There's too much blending going on here. Here I was pooling on top a little bit there. I didn't have to use a Q-tip this time, so that's nice. That's the other thing about professional watercolor paper, is that it pulls less often, in my opinion, because it's a lot more absorbent, and the way that you want paper to be for watercolor. I added just a little bit more black here. I noticed some of it pulling right here. I said this before, but I knew that it was pooling because it was like there was a black puddle with little ribbons of green on top of the black puddle. That's how I know that it is pulling together right there, and we want it all to be nice and flat, not a pool of water. It's tricky and it takes some practice to figure out exactly what the right combo is. But that looks pretty good to me. In the next video, you want to go fast if you're painting along with me because we are going to create our twinkling stars before we do our splatter stars. If you watch the twinkling stars video, you know, and if you've watched any of the other videos where I talked about it, you need to have a wet galaxy in order to do the twinkling stars. Now, you can wet the galaxy after, but it is harder that way. What I'm doing right now is I rewet this dry spot, I'm now just adding a little more black because by rewetting it, I made it look a little bit more gray or white than black. But that looks good to me. This is our first layer of the galaxy. Sometimes people do multiple layers of colors; they dry this layer and then they put on a whole new layer with colors and black. But I like to do it with just one layer, one, to preserve the paper, and two, if you're using professional watercolor paper and professional watercolors, they still look pretty vibrant. But if they're not looking vibrant enough, if you dry this and you discover, oh, I was hoping it would look a little bit more vibrant, the key is to add more layers because the more pigment you put on it, the brighter the colors are going to be. I'm moving on, and we're going to do the twinkling stars next. Can't wait to see you with a wet final galaxy in the next video. 12. Final project: Layer two: Here's our galaxy, and as I mentioned in the last video, we left it wet so that we can do the twinkling stars method. I'm going to take my bleed proof white. I'm going to get some pigment, put it in my lid, which I use as a pilot for this. Put a little bit more water to get it just a little thicker, and then while this is still wet, I'm going to put some stars to the base of our twinkling stars on here. Now, it might not be as wet as you want but mine is wet in some places and not quite [LAUGHTER] as wet as others, which will happen. But the key is to go where the wetness is. Normally you want to have one big one, maybe a few mediums for stars, and the rest are smaller ones. I've put some twinkling stars down here, and for some of them like we talked about, I'm going to blend them in with the background carefully so I don't get the wet of the paint a different color. I'm wetting my brush and cleaning it off every time because I know that when I blend in this paint with other pigment, it's picking up the wet pigment, so my brush won't be clean anymore. I'm just moving this paint aside. It blends in a little bit more, and the more it blends, the more of the white goes outward, the more that looks like light is shining outward. That's the trick. We're using this wet-on-wet technique to create the illusion of light from these stars so that they look like they are twinkling and radiating like stars do. You don't want to have too much white on the outskirts. You don't want to have a giant, just a ball of white. You want to have the edges of it be a little bit more diluted and transparent. But we're going to go back now, and we do want the very middle of them to be very white, so that when we draw the more formed lines to show the star is twinkling, that we can't really see them in the middle. That's the point. We want it to look like a big ball of light. Light is tricky because sometimes you think the way that you achieve brightest light is by putting the most pigment in it. But actually, brightest light looks white on paper. This is a lesson for another day, but when you do sunlight or you want to draw the sun in the sky, actually the sun is going to be white almost, so pale yellow and then everything else is going to be more colorful blooming outward. That's the effect we're going for here. Now, I have created the twinkling stars and I'm going to dry my galaxy. [NOISE] I'm using an embossing heat tool to dry my galaxy. I use these tools a lot when I'm painting because I don't always have time to let my pieces air dry. It's really useful for when I'm filming videos for Instagram. I bought this on Amazon. You can all go by also buy them in craft stores. That is my little spill of beans, embossing heat tool that I use as a mixture to dry out the watercolor. [NOISE] This is just about done with watercolor blocks. You can never get them completely dry because to get them completely dry, I usually have to lift up the paper and dry the underside of it, but we can't on watercolor blocks. I'm now going to create the more formed, and this is using the wet-on-dry technique. We use wet-on-wet to create the illusion of light. Now we're going to use the wet on dry to make the little spindles or I don't even know what you would call it like just beams. Star beams? [LAUGHTER] I don't know. I'm going to start with this big one, and I want the paint to be liquid enough so that I can paint with it, but I don't want so much on there so that I can only get thick one. I put some paint on the brush and then I do just a little stroke after to get some of it off, and now I'm going to use the lightest of pressure to create little crosses like that. Then, I like to do like that, a big cross and then a little one in the middle. We want to do it right in the middle of that little pool of white that we created. I'm just going to keep doing that to get my twinkling stars and they can be small or big. Can be white. You don't always have to do the double cross. It can be just across and that would look fine, but I found it nice to do both. The key no matter what is to make sure that the one going up and down is the longest in my opinion. This is long, I want to make it even. [LAUGHTER] It will turn out weird, but either way, those are twinkling stars. Now, we're going to do the splatter stars and finish off with the comment. I'm going to use this other paint, make sure it's not too wet, and just splatter some stars on here. I really like the twinkling combined with the splatter stars, but they can be messy. Like I said in my other splatter stars video, I'm going to wipe off my desk right after this so that I don't have paint on my nice desk. But adding the stars, I think can make all the difference. I like to have lots of stars on the edges if possible. There's only so much you can do to control where the stars go, but the more paint you have, the more you're able to guess where it would go. But that's also tricky because if you have too much paint, then you could create too big of stars. It's just a big trial and error process basically [LAUGHTER] in my experience. I ran out of paint, but I want a little bit more stars, so I'm taking a little bit more paint and adding some water to it. [NOISE] The stars just are naturally not going to show up as much in the middle if you have like I do some lighter space just because white on white stuff doesn't show up as much. But either way, I'm trying to get as many around the edge as I can. [NOISE] Like I mentioned in the splatter video, doing this with my little brush, I usually do it 5-10 times to get the amount of stars that I want. I'm just like holding my brush like this and hitting it like that and hitting it hard. You need to hit it harder than you think to get it to go, or else you're not going to get the results you want. There are my splatter stars, and now, I'm going to draw a little comment. I think I'm going to draw it over here, maybe like in the middle right here, because there are six stars right here and only three right here. I want to make sure it's going, so I'm going to draw a little circle, then flick my arm out like this. Sometimes it gets clumpy, which is odd because it's paint. But if that's the case, I'm going to do another little one. If it gets clumpy like that, you just have to take it off, clean the nib of the pen. Just at three comments like that. [NOISE] There you go. That is the finished galaxy in two layers. Hope you had a good time. Going to the next video where I'll recap what we talked about, and that's it for the painting portion. Thanks guys. 13. Recap: You have completed all of the lessons for this beginner's guide to get to watercolor galaxies course. You can see what my final project looks like at the end. Here is my watercolor galaxy using primary, secondary and tertiary colors and some twinkling stars in there and some comets. I would love to see what your final projects look like. Please go ahead and post your final projects to the the final project board. If you want to post them on Instagram to please feel free to tag me. My handle is this writing desk and tag me in the comments and tag me in the picture so I am sure to see them. I will give you some love and some feedback. I also do regular features of all of my Skillshare classes. If you tag me and make sure I see it, there's a decent chance that you I will feature you in my stories. Also, if you liked this class, the best thing you can do to make sure other people see this class is to go ahead and give me a like and give me a review. I want all your honest reviews. Even if you didn't like this class, I would love to hear your feedback. But particularly if you think other people could benefit from the techniques that we talked about today, give me a like, go ahead and put down your honest review. I would love to hear your thoughts about this. Thank you once again for joining me and If you're interested in any of my other watercolor, I have a few other watercolor classes. If you go to my profile, you'll be able to see all the watercolor classes that I have and stay tuned for more classes from me. In the meantime, I want to see your work. I want to see what you've done. I want to hear about it. So let me know and thank you so much for joining me today.