Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello. In this class, I'm going to take you through some easy but very effective ways of creating your own galaxy art in the greetings card size format like this. I'm going to show you my materials that I use, including the watercolor paints, and paper, and brushes, and then we're going to move on to our first galaxy, which will be created using splattered masking fluid. Then, we're going to move on to our star sign constellation. You can choose whatever star sign you are, and that'll be created using Aero pen and Posca pens. Then finally, there will be a nightscape, including the moon with wax resist and black pen. I hope these are going to be really fun because as a greetings card format, you can send them to your family and friends. You can use just one technique or mix up all three techniques. Please join me.
2. Materials Used: First of all, I want to look at some watercolor paper that you can use to make into cards for this project. This one's Winsor & Newton, but the manufacturer absolutely doesn't matter. What is important is the weight of the paper. I like to use 300 gsm for a project of this nature, and it says here, it's cold pressed or in bracket not. I'm going to show you the texture of this paper, because there are two different versions. You can see that it is very, very rough, and it will create a lovely effect, if that's what you want. The other version is called hot pressed or smooth, again it's 300 gsm. This is from a different manufacturer, Daler-Rowney. You can see, if I try and hold it quite close up, it's a lot smoother. So you're going to get a different effect when you put watercolor on this. You've seen me use the Pentel water brushes, but for the purposes of this, which is we are going to create something very quickly, so I'm using much larger brushes than I normally would, but you can use whatever brushes you've got to handle, as long as they're fairly big. One of the techniques that I'm going to look at, is to be applying masking fluid with an old toothbrush. Again, you don't have to do this technique if you haven't got any, but I think it creates a lovely effect and results, so maybe just see what happens. Another item that I'm going to be using is what I call the artist masking tape, and it's just blue, but it works very similar to masking tape. It will hold down the card while you work on it, so that the paper doesn't walk too much. If you don't have any of that, you can use masking tape, just bought standard masking tape, and they all achieve almost the same results. I would say in both cases, please do make sure the watercolor is completely dry before you take this off. Now, I'm going to show you some pens. Posca pens, you've seen me use in other classes if you've taken them in socha. This set is median nib. So there's the white one and the blue one added to which will be a gel pen. Hold it this way around. This is the Uniball Signo and this is much finer that all of these achieve pretty much the same results, but with different fineness of the nibs. Another pen that I will use in one of the classes is the Pentel pocket brush pen. You can use any black pen that you have. It doesn't have to be this, this is just my personal choice. Moving on to the paints, this is my Winsor & Newton, 24 Pan Professional Set, although I've added two more pans of color. It's just a personal preference, I have got extra blues and a green. Now, the pigments used in the professional set are a lot more vibrant. There's a lot more of it, so it's very concentrated, but you can absolutely use whatever watercolors that you have. Please don't be put off by what I'm using. Just use whatever you've got at hand, even if it's just water gouache , it would work just as well. Talking of gouache, at some point, I will probably use water dan white gouache just to add areas of lightness. If you don't have any, you can use white watercolor.
3. Preparing Your Greetings Card: First of all, I need to cut the paper to the right size. It's either 12" X 9" or 305 millimeters by 229 millimeters. I'm going to take a sheet of this and just cut it to the size that I want. Obviously, if you want a square card you'll have to measure it out so that the dimensions are different to what I'm going to be doing. I'm going to be cutting this in half basically and then folding it. I'm going to make two little marks here at the halfway point. The only thing I would bear in mind is, whatever size you do, make sure it's going to fit in a set of standard envelopes. Because if you get it just a few millimeters too big, you'll either have to go up the next envelope size up or trim a bit of your card down. I've got this, now I'm going to fold this in half using the edge of my scalpel. There we go. You can either obviously use it portrait like this or landscape like this.
4. Warm up Exercise: Now for the warm up because it's always good to just have a little play around. I've just got my sketchbook, which is just cartridge paper, it is nothing special, it's not watercolor paper, it's just quite heavy duty cartridge paper, very cheap to buy. I want to play around with a candle using the wax resist method, which will appear in one of the classes. I just want to create a series of shapes, round ones, and some mark making as well, like this. The reason we're going to do this is again, I want to emphasize that with this technique, especially you cannot control the outcome. You have some control. I don't know if you can just see it, the sheen where the wax goes down, but beyond that, you can't actually control it and you have to pretty much accept the outcome or work with what happens. I just mixed up some blue on a very large paint brush and I'm going to apply it now and see what the wax has done. Just bring the watercolor here so you can see them. I'm just literally just using one tone of blue. Oh, actually I might use a few others. Let's see what happens and there's a black over here. What I was saying before that you can't control the outcome. I know roughly where I put the wax. But there are so many other factors involved because it depends on the quality of the paint that you using, the quality of the wax that you use, and your results won't come out like my results and that's okay.There are all magical things happening here and it's wonderful to say and I can't predict. I know I keep going on about it, but to a certain extent, I can't predict how that's going to happen, that I applied that watercolor quite thickly and you can see the difference where I applied the watercolor thinly. You can make decisions like that, that will affect the outcome. But ultimately, you have to work with what comes out, it is what comes out.This is just a really fun exercise, again, for letting go of outcomes, which for this class, the techniques that I'm using, I'm adding a very dark wash there just to see what happens. I can show you what happens when I do something. But it might not necessarily going to be what happens for you, and cannot stress enough how I want you to play with this aspect. Please, post your experiments, your play, your wax resist play in the class projects. I would rather that you explored your own galaxies, particularly drawn to a galaxy that's purple. I haven't done a purple galaxy. You'll learn in your own way, and it is okay to make mistakes. We all do it. That is how we learn. I'm going to add some purple here, just to see how it's going to turn out. There we go, how that blends in there. It is important to make mistakes. I know some of you are beginners and you're a little bit scared of a process where the outcome is not guaranteed. But I really would like to see unique galaxies because that's what galaxies are. Every galaxy out there in real space is completely different to the other one. The laws of physics affect different galaxies in different ways and gravity and all that business. In terms of looking at it from that angle, I think it's great to understand that we are all unique and everything is coming and going. We're all part of this big universe. I know that could be a bit heavy there. But please don't be afraid to experiment..
5. Starscape: This is the Pinterest image that I'd really love to recreate as a lovely section of pink hair going into a purple. First of all, I'm going to tape the edges of my card down to give it some stability. I am going to try and make the edges fairly even. Now, looking at the reference, I want to preserve the whiteness of this paper, so I'm going to be using my masking fluid with the toothbrush. Luckily I've got one that's got a very small head. So I'm going to going to deep that in there and you can see it is now on there. I'm going to flick it across the page in a relatively random manner. There's a big splotch there but not to worry, because we can incorporate this and use it to our advantage. The only thing is, you must let this dry completely now. Otherwise, it won't work. Now, you can tell when the masking fluid is dry. It shouldn't take too long because most of these sludges are very tiny and they go a translucent color and you can hardly see. I know you can get blue versions so that you can see it better but this is just masking fluid that I've got. Now we're moving on to the actual painting of it. I'm going to refer to my reference again and looking at it, there is a big deep area of pink and I have just the watercolor for that. It's permanent rose, by Winsor Newton. First of all, I'm going to just slightly wet the paper using a very big brush. Do it quickly so it will soak in. It's a warm day, it's going to sink into the paper quite quickly. So I'm going to try and work as fast as I can. Pick up a quite large amount of this permanent rose and it goes in like a crescent shape here. A bit more than that because it's very prominent. Then it goes into a deep purple hue and the purple now. Again, I'm hoping that I haven't left it too long because I still want this paint to spread within that pink so that it merges. You can see already it's starting to create these effects. Try and work when the paper is still wet. I might actually have to wet this section down here and gathering into here as well. You can see the paint's already doing its thing there. Adding a bit more purple down here. There we go. I might leave that section up here quite plain. I'm going to see what it does when I add a tiny bit more water. Oh, that could be quite effective. Leave that. I'm just going to add a bit of more pink just here just to see what it does. I don't know how it's going to spread. I'm going to get the hairdryer and give it a very gentle dry now. Now you can see I've only dried it gently because I didn't want the paint to be spreading out too much. But this is how it's turned out and there are beautiful, beautiful things happening down there. I'm looking at my reference and I need to add another layer now because it goes into cyan and then an ultra marine towards the top here. I'm going to add those in another layer. Again try and keep the paint very wet and loose. Working quickly, I don't want to be overworking at this stage. We might add a few more details as we go along but I'm going to make the emphasis of the blue up here and add the much darker Payne's gray, ultra marine, towards the edges as I can see in my reference. It gets very dark around the corners. I'm using water dipped in my jar just to mix areas of color together. I think I'm going to have to switch my brush and I'm going to use more of a round brush to mix some of these colors in together. The flat brush gives certain results and that's not quite what I'm wanting at the moment. I'm going into the edges now using my round brush. I'm going to go right up to the edges, I think. Again dip my paintbrush in the water just to help it merge with the layer that we put down originally. There we go. We're going to give it another dry and then see how it looks. We're almost there in terms of dryness and I'm going to assess it now. I do feel that the edges still need to go darker. Is lovely and dark down here in that corner. That's exactly what I want. I think for me, I might need to add a bit more purple, just to give the intensity. I could leave it like this. I could take the masking fluid off now but I really wanted to be intense and dramatic so I think just another wash of quite deep purple. I'm going to put just along here. Using my round brush dipped in water, just to help smooth it down the edges. I think I'm going to mix the purple with the ultra marine and use it in that corner there and also down here. Just a tiny bit more purple here. It's gone light there and I think that's going to be it. I'm going to dry it one more time and then we're going to take the masking tape off. I've given it another dry and I've tried to make sure it is as dry as possible so that when we lift off the tape, it's not going to tear too much. Keep your fingers crossed. I'm doing this live. I'm not going to edit it if something goes wrong. I'm taking this corner here, it's looking good so far. There we go. I'm just going to move the camera so you can see. You will be there if anything has gone untoward. There's a little sploge there but overall, that's not bad. We've got a fairly even boarder around there and it's not being in this. Now, I'm making sure again that the paint is completely dry because the thing with masking fluid is, if the paint isn't dry when you rub it off, you are going to smudge it. You may want to use a rubber but I'm just going to use my finger here and start off in this corner. Can you see where I've rubbed it? The paper from underneath shows up. Now that's where we have the splodges but we're going to deal with that. Try and get all of that excess masking fluid off. I think everything's come off there. Now we're just going to work back into that. All this, I've messed a bit up here. I'm just going to work into that bit. It's not a problem. I think I'm going to use some of that pink, just to fill in that area there. Just work on that general area. Continue down into this section here where there is that crescent of pink. I think that's pretty darned good. I really enjoyed that. There's also some other little marks here. Again I'm just going to use in this pink because I wanted to preserve that luminosity of the paper underneath, just going to fill that in there. I think this one could do with a tiny bit of purple mixed in, just there. Just using your fingers tips. Oh, I've just ballsed up that bit at the edge. Never mind, I'm going to have to take a scalpel to that and then scrape it off. Let's take a close look. I want to show you how the masking fluid has really made the white wide. Of course, if you don't have masking fluid, after you've done this section, you could flick white gouache onto this and it would give a pretty similar effect. But I don't think it would be as white as what I'm seeing here. I'm really, really pleased with the results. You see there.
6. Mistakes-old skool method: I'm just going to quickly show you a really old school technique, back in the day when things were hand-rendered. I just got really sharp scalpel here and I'm just going to scrape it. This is something that obviously could be easily done in photoshop, but I'm actually going to be sending this card out so I can't read that. I'm just trying to clean up the edge there. It's not perfect, but It's better than it was. This bloodshed which I created by accident earlier. If you don't have access to a scalpel, you could try using white goulash to paint over these areas, but if the pigment is very strong, it might not quite work, so you might have to experiment. You just need to turn it a tiny bit and I think that's acceptable to send to a friend or a sister.
7. Star Sign Constellation : For this next card, I'm actually going to be using my own star sign, which is Aquarius. It's relatively complicated, I've not actually looked this up before but it's about 12 stars there. I think we're going to have to use a portrait format for the card. This time I'm not going to be using tape to hold it down because I don't actually want to border, we're going to do something that's a little bit more organic and spread out. I've quickly googled what the element for Aquarius is. It is actually an air sign, but the colors associated with it are electric blue, ultramarine, and gray. I'm going to try and incorporate that within this card just for fun. I am wetting the paper again and I'm going to start in the middle with a very bright blue. I think I'll just spread it like that to see how that looks. Then I'm going to build up the colors around it trying to keep it as random as possible, I don't want to start making it too formulaic. I'm going to have to create something that's oval in shape but not uniform, only because I need to fit in the stars within that constellation. I'm adding dabs of ultramarine blue here at the edges so that it creates quite a random look. I'm going to give it a dry now, see what happens. I've dried it off completely now and I'm looking again at the color that we've got happening here. I'm trying to be mindful that I'll be using a white gel pen to add the constellations. I do actually think this part needs to be a little bit darker, so I'm going to go in there again. I do like the effect that's happening around the outside there. I might just leave that for the time being, but I need to work on this section here, this part in particularly, I think it's just a touch to light. I'm just going to wet it again. Already you can see that it's creating a different effect and go in again and see what else is going to happen there. Now, that's already darkening up. That's good. I think I need more that electric blue just in some of these places here. I've got a bit too much water on that, that's a bit excessive. Dry off my brush and go in again. Obviously, you can use whatever star sign that you like. It does not have to be the colors that you use. It don't have to be associated with the star sign. I just thought it might be interesting for me to see what happens since I'm an Aquarius. I'm just mixing it up into the background now. This royal blue acts like a intermediate blue to bring the foreground with the background, applied randomly though. This area here, I don't think is quite as intense as I'd like it, so I'm just going to go in again, wet that general area and try and draw upon a bit more ultramarine and hopefully, that would just give it that intensity that I'm really after. That's a bit better. I'm going to just turn my card so that it flows downwards. At the moment it's just a little bit too flat. I'm trying to create a few more effects there. That's a much better. I've just tilted the card very slightly. I'm going in with a brush that's only got water on it. I'm going to draw it outwards and see what effects I can create there. There we go. I might do the same just here. I think I could do of a bit more intensity there. I'll wet that area and dropping a bit more ultramarine. Again, using a brush that's only got water on it to see how that color can be drawn away from that area. Fantastic. I'm going to draw this now, I think with that. I don't like that line happening there. Just soften it with some water. Time to assess it again, there's this blog with a hard edge, so I'm just softening it with some water and there's still a bit of a wet patch of ultramarine there. I'm drawing it out again just using a brush with water on it. Now, that was three layers worth and I think that result there's lots happening there. There's depth, there's intensity. I'm going to go back and look at my reference for the Aquarius constellation. I'm going to get my white gel pen, the Uni-ball gel pen and start mapping out. This need to make a mental calculation here, there's the bottom four stars about here. I'm just going to quickly plot. I'm not going to make a big mark because I need to make sure I've got enough space towards the top. Then there's some stars here, that goes up to there. There's a little one here and then it goes here and and it goes up the top. There's some stars that come off there and then there's a line that goes all the way up there. I think I can plot them in now. I'm just going to create a typical star icon and the other one goes across more like here actually. In between, there's a star here. It's more up here. This one's a slightly smaller star. It joins off about here. There's only a little one joining underneath it about there. From here, it goes at an angle, I've slightly miscalculated there but it doesn't matter because I need to use the tiniest marks. It goes about there, so there's another large star there. Well, I do have some points down. I am reassessing them all the time and looking at the relationship between each point of the star to make sure that they're in the right places. Just think about it just for a few seconds before you finalize your star and you'll be grateful that you did. Now, we are ready to join up the stars with the lines. You can see this area, I'm glad I darkened it up because there is several stars that fall in that area. That's worked well. Now, it's just a case of joining up all the stars with the single line to make up the constellation. There we go. We've got that in place. I'm going to write Aquarius just here I think. There's a nice bit of [inaudible] negative space there. I'm not using any fancy script. This is just my normal handwriting, but of course you can add some calligraphy if you're very good at it, which I'm not. Now, we're going to finish this off by using our poster pens. I'm going to use the blue one. Just pick out some blues here. Just for contrast and the white one. Well, there you can achieve quite a lot of control using poster pens. I am keeping the little pinpricks of light or the stars very random, so there's some in clusters and some are quite far apart. Just a few up here, I think, just for the contrast and in this section here and there we have it. My Aquarius card. I'm really pleased with that. I really like that.
8. Night Lanscape: For my next card, I really wanted to add something different, like the moon. I'm looking at my Pinterest board and what comes up is images like this. There's a moon in the sky, but also down here there's trees contrasting against the sky, so it shows up. So the background color in this version, I can actually make quite light. I don't have to add such intense colors because we've got this happening in the background. I'm thinking, when I come to do this, I can make a graduation so that it goes from dark at the top to light at the bottom. I'm going to attempt it and see how it goes. For this card is going to be quite a organic shape. I don't want to be using the blue masking tape, but you can if you want. I will use a candle. We're going to use the wax resist method that if you took the lighthouses class, you'll see that I used it there. We're going to mask out an area with this candle. Is just a basic white candle. I'm going to make it in the upper right corner. Not too big, but not too small. I have to get down and crouch quite low to see where I'm applying this candle. From a certain angle you can see where you've put it, so I can see that it's not quite round enough yet. Where I've put that wax, there will be no paint. Now proportionally, at around about down here, so we're talking about the lower quarter of the card, I would like to introduce a line of trees. So in order to do that, I need to make sure that the colors down here are going to be quite light. So I'm going to apply the water fairly quickly. It is a warm day. Hopefully I can apply the colors that I want before this water soaks in too much. I'm going to start with yellow, I think at the bottom. That hopefully will remain quite light. That's going to be a good start. I think the rest of the sky going upwards will turn into a greeny blue, dark turquoise, but let's see how it goes. It's difficult to tell at this stage and I don't want to be an over-controlling. You can see where it's pushing up against the wax now. That's going to look good. I'm going to introduce a slightly darker blue up here now, up against the edges here. There's something happening down here. I might just draw that out. Dry it a bit more. I'm going to go in again, but using a much darker blue over here. I do like the moon in it's a little area of the sky there, so I'm not going to mess about with that too much. I'm now filling in at the edges with much darker shades of ultramarine, but also a bit of royal blue. The paintbrush is being dipped into water quite frequently so that I can move the paint about mixing it in with the initial first wash of color. Please try not to make too rigid a mark. Keep it very fluid and organic. It does depend what sort of colors you're using for your card, but try to add lots of graduations of colors so that you build up the intensity layer by layer and it gives that depth and it tells a much better story of the night sky that you're creating here. Don't be timid to go back in with darker bits of color, mix it in, assess it. Keep your eye moving about your card to see areas that might need attention. I've made some little marks here by accident. I'm just going to quickly go back in. The moon is just a bit too blue and white. So I'm going to add a bit more contrast to that by using thick watercolor. Remember there's wax in that area. I'm just going to play with that. See what effect it makes. You cannot all or you cannot control how wax resistance turns out. There's too much contrast happening in this. I'm just going to use a kitchen towel to lift some of that off. But I think that's working much better than this dark contrast that was happening a little bit earlier. I've got my scalpel and I'm going to define the edges just a little bit better so it reads as a much rounder shape. Although it won't be a perfect circle. I think the effect that I'm creating with a scalpel is just what I need to set off the moon against the background, and it ties in with the texture that's already there from the wax resist. Now before I put in the line of trees just here, I'm going to add the stars. This time I am going to use white gouache with a toothbrush. I might try and do a diagonal emphasis down there. See how it looks. There is going to be a line of trees down here, so that might be nice to contrast against the black pen that I'm going to be using. So now I need to let that dry. Now, the gouache is dried completely because I'm going to be going in with my pentel pocket brush. I'd like to create a row of trees, but I'm looking at my reference and some of them actually have like little hills happening here, which I think would suit this layout very well because I've got these loads of stars down here. What I'm going to do, I'm just going to add the suggestion of a hill here. I'm going to add a little steeper hill here, I think. Let's add some trees. This is going to be in the foreground. so I think the trees here are going to have to be slightly larger. So I'll do quite small trees on this hill. You can already see that the black pen is showing up very nicely against that turquoise. I just quickly put in the trunk of the tree just to give me a positional for where the branches are going to go. Obviously, you can use whatever trees you fancy to silhouette against the sky. In your version you don't have to use evergreens. You can use a much finer black pen if you wanted a lot more branch details. I'm just assessing it now. I was going to fill this for in, but I've really liked that effect there. I'm not going to fill it in because I just want to see how it all is going to look. The trees here are in the foreground and I'm going to make them bigger. I'm trying to vary the height and size of the tree to give a bit more of an indication of depth, which I think will help with the illusion of the night sky. So I'm keeping it very loose yet at the same time being mindful that this is like a forest, so the trees have to be quite close together. This line of trees is just a little bit too regular for me. I'm going to have to break them up bit, but they look good. I just need suggestions of other trees happening here, I think. I'm just adding a few more trees to fill up the gaps on the negative space and to enhance the illusion that we're witnessing a forest. Now, I really like that. I'm just going to go back and show you. This is where we're at at the moment. There's the tiny bit too much negative space here. I'm going to fill that up and we're almost there. I'm just adding the smallest suggestion of trees going off into the horizon. Oh, and I really like that. I really like this hill. Again, there's tiny bit too much negative space there. I am going to continue with this tree down here, just to break up that line. I think a tree here just to break up that line, even though I do love what's happening in there. It just needed that tiny bit more of a contrast. Wow, I'm super pleased with that. I will take away these little splotches. But this is how it's looking at the moment. It looks really magical. There's something a bit like Aurora Borealis about it too and the colors really work well. I'm absolutely thrilled with this one. This is the first time I've done it on camera as well and so I'm super pleased that you were here to share this with me.
9. Final Thoughts & Controlling Outcomes: Thanks so much for taking this class. I really do hope that you enjoyed yourselves creating your own galaxies and I can't wait to see all the different color combinations or different techniques that you've chosen to do. Please upload them in the class projects. I can't wait to see them and if you want to share on Instagram or social media, please use the hashtag [inaudible] Skillshare and I will try my very best to see all of them. There's something that I wanted to talk to you about today, and it's about trying to control outcomes. This wanting to control is actually based on fear and I know it would be very tricky to get out of this mindset, but please try and listen to what my opinions are on this subject. Because I do think creative people actually feel it in a more heightened way especially if you're at the start of your creative journey. Wanting to be in control is actually giving you a false sense of security because you think you're going to be safe. But the irony is, you're never in control, ever. That is a fact of life. We do actually have to allow and factor in risks when we create art because we would never grow and if you know about my sketchbook journey, you know, I started off using black line because I wanted that drawing to be perfect before I started applying the watercolor. So I totally get this need for control. But in actual fact, being attached to specific outcomes means you become closed off to happy accidents and some wonderful possibilities. That's part of the reason why I've introduced the warm-up exercises so that you can just have fun. You can just play around in your sketch book and make mistakes. See what happens when you add water, see what happens when you add different water colors together and it's a safe place to practice and you don't have to be fixated on the outcome at that stage. I know it is kind of a big deal to get away from the predictability mindset, but I do feel that you have to tell yourself nothing bad is going to happen. In fact, good things are going to happen. Please trust me, I have been there. Being open and receptive to these happy accidents will start the intuition flowing when you start to paint and for me, painting is almost become like meditation because I'm in the zone and I'm happy. I'm breathing really calmly. For I will say this, it is a skill and it's something that I practice almost on a daily basis and I'm still a work in progress. In order to let go of outcomes, I do think you have to be kind to yourself as you feel your way through this process. Don't let frustration and fear drag you down because then that will impact on how you paint as well. Just be present and lean into the discomfort. Try to smile and breathe and have faith that it's going to work out in some shape or form on many different levels and I absolutely do trust in your creativity. Please don't be fearful that what you create is different from what I create because I'm on my creative journey and you're on your creative journey. Trust and belief go hand in hand, and it's very much part of the process. So please trust yourself, believe in yourself, believe in your paints, believe in your technique, and keep on enjoying the process and be kind to yourself during your creative process. I look forward to seeing you soon. Have a wonderful week. Bye for now.
Ohn Mar Win, Illustrator Artist Educator
