Full Moon Illustrations in Watercolor

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Vanessa less maniac and welcome to another Skillshare class. If this is your first time taking a class with me, welcome. I am an artist and an artisanal watercolor paint maker. You can find me over on Instagram, YouTube, MPG. On. Across these platforms you'll be able to find free tutorials, live painting events, speed paints, free watercolors, shop discounts, and so much more. One of my greatest loves has always been painting moons. And then today's class, I am going to show you the step-by-step process of painting a detailed moon in watercolor from supplies to find the references, to even painting a beautiful backgrounds, you'll have everything you need by the end of this class to create your own beautiful full moon illustration. So get ready to gather your supplies, and let's begin. 2. Finding a reference: So before we begin with a full moon illustration, it's always a really good idea to look at real-life photography full moons up close. So I have this app called Unsplash, where it has a ton of free, free use photography. And I typed in full moon, you can get, you can get the app and you can also just go on to unsplash.com and you'll be able to take a look at everything they have. They have photography, I'm basically anything that you need. So here are a couple of examples I just typed in full moon and you can scroll through it and take a look at any of the ones that call to you. There are a couple of smaller ones and you can just enlarge it by pinching your fingers if you are in the actual app. You can also save any of the pictures that you see by pressing the little plus sign at the bottom. And you can add it to a collection or make a new collection. So I have a moons collection and I'm going to add a couple of those to them. So scroll through Unsplash and look for any full moon illustration that calls to you. There are so many to choose from. These are just a couple of them. So we want ones that have quite a bit of detail in it so that we can take a look at them later and decide which one we are actually going to choose for our illustration. I'm not only looking at the ones with the black background, but I'm looking at other ones with different backgrounds to give us a couple of choices as to how we are going to do our illustrations. If you do not have Unsplash or don't want Unsplash, you can also look in Pinterest. And in Pinterest, I just searched for full moon photography. And I highly suggest that you look at real pictures of the moon instead of artist's renditions of the Moon. This will help you in giving the moon your own touch. If you're looking at an artist's rendition of a moon, you are more likely to paint your moon the way that you see that the other artists have done. So take a look through all of the illustrations or all of the photography, and again, picks up on that call to you, save them. And you can just have these, all of these moons as reference. So we're going to pick a couple to paint today in this Skillshare class. But it's always a really good idea if you are really into moonscape and moon paintings to have a couple of references in your back pocket. So these are two very great websites that you can use to find some really good references. I'm going to give you an example of some other things that you can find. I'm also going to look for a crescent moon over in Unsplash because I do prefer Unsplash for this because you get more photographic pictures than artist's renditions. So I'm going to look at a couple of crescent moons in, in Unsplash and save those as well. It'll give you a sort of a different perspective, a perspective on some of the moons. And it'll give you a closer look. Sometimes the crescent moons. With a crescent moons, you get a closer look at the moon and all of the ridges, and all of the craters and the lighting the way it hits. And so you get a lot more detail when you're looking at different types, not just the full moon. So in this course we definitely are going to be concentrating on full moons, but it's always a good idea to get different references and to get different ideas of moons that you can choose. So that is finding a reference. And I will see you in the next one. 3. Supplies: For this class, I will be using Legion Stonehenge, Aqua cold press, which is 100% cotton watercolor paper. So what I've done is I've taken a sheet of this and I've cut it into a square just so that I can have my moon perfectly rounded inside of the paper. I will be using a quill wash brush. And this is just an imitation squirrel brush, and it is very soft and perfect for big washes on paper. I will also be using a size 12 round brush. The makers of the brush doesn't matter the brand. And anyone will do a size eight round brush, as well as a small size one spot brush. You didn't use a liner brush. A very small brush aside 000, whichever one you want, just make sure it's a really small one for details, I will be using Copic, opaque white. Feel free to use whatever white medium you have, such as Dr. Ph. Martin's whitewash, white acrylic, watercolor. Any white medium can be substituted for this. I will be using some washi tape to tape down my paper to a board. Again, feel free to use any tape that you have available. I also have a helix maker, which makes really great circles because I am awful at them, but feel free to substitute any round object like a cup or a dish or bowl or any anything round. I will be using. A paper towel comes in very handy, as well as jar of water or a glass of water. And for my water jars, jars, I always use an old candle jars with a little paint pink in it, which really helps to clean my brushes out. And finally, a pencil. I could not find my pencil, so I just grabbed myself a watercolor pencil in some odd color. But any pencil will do. 4. Painting the Moon: Okay, To begin, I am just taking some washi tape and I am taping down a square piece of watercolor paper to this white board. Now, the board I'm taping it down to is actually the back of an old water paper watercolor paper pad. So you know how the watercolor paper pads, you Bye, have really hard backing to it. When I'm done with my path, I just take that off and use that as a space to tape my paper down. So there's a nice little pro tip for you. So I'm just taking this down. I'm not being very fussy about it. I just want to make sure that it's going to have a very small area of white showing through since I'll be cutting that off when I'm done with all of it. Okay, now we're going to take a round object. I use a helix maker. You feel free to use whatever circular object you may have. And I am taking this and joining a giant circle right in the middle of my paper, I want to have it centered. Again. You don't have to do this. What we're learning today is the skills to make the moon, however you illustrated or place it on your paper is up to you. I will be using for the inside of the moon. I will be using Daniel Smith's moon glow, and that's the only color that we are using inside of the moon. This color is extremely versatile because it separates into 23 different colors. So you don't have to do much with it. Okay, now with a, with a wash brush, this is a squirrel imitation squirrel wash brush. And it holds a ton of water. And it has a nice thick brush head. I am going to just lay down some water on the, inside my circle. And since I am using 100% cotton watercolor paper, this water or this circle, the moon is going to stay wet for really, really long time. If you are not using 100% water, 100% cotton, watercolor paper, you may have to continually re-wet the the areas that you're working on. So if that's the case, just keep this brush handy. It's not going to be a deal breaker. But just keep a big soft brush handy so that you can add water as you go. As you see that parts of your paper begins to dry. Now that the inside of the circle is a nice and wet, I am switching to a size 12 round brush. And again, we're only using one color for the inside of this circle or the inside of the spoon. And that's moon glow by Daniel Smith. If you want to use any other color, absolutely. Feel free to use any color that you'd like. Separating color works really lovely with wounds, but you don't need that. You can follow these same techniques a colleague you have. So as you see, I'm going to start with a very light layer of this color along the edges of the moon. And I'm really allowing that water to kind of pull the paint out into the rest of the circle. So let the water do what the water does, let it help the paint flow. And once you lay the paint down, don't mess with it too much. As you'll see here. After I laid down and initial wash on the left side of the paper, I just go in with plain water to pull some of that paint over to the right-hand side of the paper. So we are not starting off with a very heavy hand. We're starting off very lightly. And you'll see here, I am just using water. So I rinse my brush off and I go back in with just plain water and pull some of that paint in. You'll see right here where I'm pointing that there's already some separation of this color. You see a little bit of blue and purple showing through and that's the beauty of colors such as the East. Okay? Now I'm going back in and I am going to start building the color. So as you notice, I'm going to throw up a little screen, a screenshot of, of a reference for this. And you're going to notice that there are, there are very dark areas of the moon as well as light areas of the moon. There. The moon has lots and lots of texture and we are going to try to recreate that here. So I'm making sure that parts of the moon, and I am thinking around this area here, are going to be way darker than other areas. So this is where I go in. And I add in a lot of color. I just have that color it. Have fun. A couple of areas of a darker saturation of this color. Now I am moving on to a size eight round brush. And I want to get a little bit more precise with even more concentration of color. So using the very tip of this brush, I'm going to dot in a very heavy concentration of this color onto the already wet paper. Remember if your paper is beginning to dry out a little bit more water to prevent any drying. So now I'm going to take it to the very edge of the right side of the moon. And I'm going to add a heavy concentration this color and drag it out just a little bit towards the middle. But keep a lot of that towards this very edge of the moon. As you go, as you're moving around here, Moon at a couple of dots of very heavy concentration of color. And if you take a look at the ones in the middle that we've done, they've already started to lighten up a bit. And that's because the paper is wet and it's spreading that color out. So that's what we want. We want a nice heavy consciousness concentration that will eventually spread out a little. It'll still remain heavier than the rest of the piece, but it'll be sticking out just a little bit more. And now I'm going to load my brush with water and we're going to tap in color. We want to add a lot of texture to this moon, and this is one of the ways to start building that texture. Now switch to a, an even smaller brush. So I am using a number one spot brush. And I'm going to be using my copic, opaque white. Remember, use what you have if you don't have co-pay, co-pay quite use white watercolor, white gouache, white acrylic, even any of that. And now I'm going to identify what are the really dark spots on my moon. And I'm going to put a small outline using the very tip of my brush. Dipped. Didn't wait. I'm gonna put a small outline of white around that dark spot. And this is going to give the illusion of a crater, right? Because we're going to have a lighter outside, darker inside so that we don't have a really harsh line around the outside. Clean your brush off, dry it a little, and blends those white edges into the paints. And we're going to do this several times over several of the dark spots to start forming craters with them. Now one of the things that you want to remember is you don't want to outline the entire area with white. Pick a couple of of of the edges of it. So I'm going to pick on mine this lower right-hand edge. And I'm going to highlight that a bit. And we're going to just give it just a little touch of a highlight. And you can already see that just by adding this little detail, this is little tiny bit away to the edges of these dark spots. It's already giving it that 3D kind of look. It's already beginning to look a lot more like a crater then, you know, just a dark spot on your paper. So do that for several of them. I want to do it for each and every one of them of your big dark dark spots. But I would add it for a couple here and there. Feel free to pick which ones you'd like. And once you've done that, you can also add a couple of highlights to the moon as I've done here, by adding in some of that white in just, just, just a touch of it. We don't want to cover the entire movement away, but to some of the lighter areas as well. And make sure to blend out the edges with clean water on your brush. Now with a bit of that white, Let's add a really big crater in the center of this biggest dark spot. And this is going to be where all of the striations are going to be like emanating out of in the moon. So we wanted to have a nice big crater. And then we're going to lighten that up just a bit because we don't want any stark white on our moon. And we're going to add a little bit of your original moon color to the center of that, just to give it a little bit more depth. And add also a tiny bit of the dark color to the areas just around You're white circle. And this is, this is going to give it a little bit of depth and it's going to make it, make it look a little bit more realistic. Then, again, just having like a circle onto your paper, a circle of color or a circle of whites. We want to give it a little bit of depth, that little bit of shadow. From here, I'm going to continue adding my little white details. Feel free to add as many or as little as you want. One thing that I do recommend is to change your perspective every now and then. So once you have done a fair amount of adding your white highlights, get up and look at your paper from a different angle. You'll see then if there are some areas that are missing it, if they're more concentrated on the left side as opposed to the right side. So change your perspective. Pick your paper up, put it in front of you, and look at it from a different angle. That will give you just a whole new outlook on your piece. And it will help you see where there are some gaps in your painting. Once you're satisfied with the placement of your light, it's time to add in some shadows. So using that same small brush, we are going to add a thicker concentration, I guess, or a deeper concentration of your original moon color to the inner edges of those white areas. So around the same areas where you originally added that dark color, we're going to add it just to the inner edges of it. And if your paper is still wet, you shouldn't have too much problem with the paint flowing into the moon. If your paper is beginning to dry, or you'd have to do is clean off your brush on a paper towel just as I did here and kind of coax it along. You don't want the thing that you want to avoid is having one hard line of color. So you don't want it to look. You don't want it to look as if you've outlined the inside of the moon. You wanted to blend into that dark area. So you can help that along again, if your paper is still wet, you won't need to do much. However, if your paper is beginning to dry a little, you might want to help it along by pushing in some of that color. So do this to most of the areas that you have laid the white down, give it a little bit of depth by adding in some shadows. Now let's give this piece even more texture by spattering in some white. So before we splattered in some of that original moon color, in my case, it was moon glow. And now let's add in some weights. So we're doing the exact same thing. When you're doing this, make sure you have a lot of water on your brush because that will help the weight or the paint flow off of your brush tablet against another brush. You can also use a toothbrush as well. A toothbrush will allow you to have a finer midst of splatter on your paper. Um, I just like to use a small precision, precision brush, such as this number one spot brush. So just go crazy out of everywhere at it all over your mood. We want a lot of texture and don't worry, we are going to continue to paint over this. So some of this will actually be covered up. When you are satisfied with the white. Add a little bit more of your original mood color on top of that. And this is going to give it that nice, grainy look that the moon has. When you're done, change your perspective and take a look at your piece. I've done that and I've noticed that I don't really have that much though, that many areas where there it's really, really dark. So I'm going to add in a bit more of my original moon color to certain parts where I feel like it's missing a little bit of depth. So you can really achieve this by taking, taking a look at your piece from another perspective, from another angle. So that's what I'm doing here. I'm adding in some more areas of darkness and shadow on the Moon. Once you are done adding in and fussing around with it, such as, such as I am, I like to fuss with with everything. So adding in the finer details of the dark and the light allow the moon to fully dry. Before moving on to the next step, we're painting the background next. So we want the moon to be fully, fully dry. 5. Painting the Background: Once I have a short that my moon is completely dry, I am going to take a mix of enthroned quinone blue, Payne's gray, and a tiny bit of lamp, black to darken it up a bit. All of these colors are by M Graham and the Payne's gray leans a little blue. So there's going to be lots of blue showing through on our backgrounds. I like to start off with a pretty big puddle on my palette. And as my puddle goes down, as I'm painting the background, I like to add a little bit more of one of the three colors. That way my background isn't completely one-color, and you'll see a lot of those different hues of blue and a little bit of that black really showing through. So I am using my size eight round brush. Feel free to use a bigger brush or a smaller brush. But I'm going to be working in two layers. And for this first layer, I'm using a bit of a smaller brush so I can have a bit more precision around the moon. It tends to have shaky hands. So I like to take this part really, really slow. Now. I'm not going to speed any of this up. So if you're working along with me, you can take your time and paint slowly as you'll see me doing here. And I'm painting the entire background in this little mix of color. So there are going to be two edges when you're working with a background, right? There's going to be, if you take a look here, there's going to be that edge at the bottom where I started. And then there's going to be the edge that I am working towards. So I'd like my background to be uniform. I don't like my backgrounds to have any hard water spots. And a hard water spot basically is when one part of your painting dries and you work your way towards it. And by the way, by the time you get back to that, you'll have one area that's wet and one that's dry. And you'll see how do you say like a delineation, you'll be able to see that your pain has dry. So I don't like that to happen on my paper. So what I do is I will add a little puddle of paint to the end that I am not working on. So you'll see if you take a look, I'm working right now on the right-hand side. And if you take a look at the left-hand side, you'll see that there's a pretty big puddle of paint over there. And as long as you keep that puddle wet and puddle Lee, for lack of a better word, you'll be able to go back to it and keep adding water. You can keep adding paint and you can switch from side to side as you see here, I added another little puddle to this side. And I'm turning my paper around and I'm going to work on the other side. You can also see that as I am adding more paint to the paper, I'm also adding a little bit more color, so one side looks a little bit more blue than the other side. If you don't like that, feel free to use the same puddle and add to that puddle the same amounts that you've added before. I like my sky to have a little bit of, you know, a little bit of fun, a little bit of character. So I like to add different colors to it. And I like to work in different saturations of that color as well. But this is the first layer and we're not going to worry too much about what the colors look like or how much paint we have. The first layer is just kinda forgetting that base down on your paper. Now, I am continuing to take it pretty slowly around those edges so that I don't get any paints in my role at all. Now, once both sides get pretty close, you can start alternating between the sides CQI, both sides wet. And once they meet up in the middle, you'll have a nice even backgrounds. So they will be no hard water lines, there will be no drying halfway through. You'll have a nice, beautiful even background. One of the things that I love to do when working on backgrounds is working wet on wet. So I am not going to allow this background so dry. I am going at parts of it are drying and that's okay. But I'm going to continue working on the background with a second layer. I am also going to increase my brush size. So I'm moving onto my size 12 brush. I don't need as much precision as I needed for the first layer because the moon already has a nice beautiful layer around it. And I don't have to worry too much about my hand accidentally Pushing color into the moon because there's already color there. I have, I have a better guide for myself. If you feel that it's going to be a problem working with a bigger brush if you feel like you still might be able to make a mistake and get some color into your moon than stick with your smaller brush. But I'm right now picking up a bigger brush. And you'll see also that I'm adding a little bit more blue to this layer that I did to the previous layer. Now when both layers dry, you'll be able to see all three of those colors, the blue, the Payne's gray, and the black kind of shining through that background. So we're going to do the same exact thing that we did in the first layer. Remember to keep a little puddle over the edges that you're not working on. And we're just going to continue adding more color to the background. I'm only going to add two layers if you feel that your layers are not dark enough and you want it even darker, then feel free to add more layers or add a little bit more lamp, black or Payne's gray to your puddle. Allow your piece to completely dry before moving on to the next step. Once my piece has dried, I am going to remove my washi tape because I no longer need that paper to lay flat. The next step is going to be working with details and we won't be adding too much water. So the paper was in no danger of curly. So if you're, if you have some tape down, feel free to remove it. 6. Adding Final Details: Okay, it's time to add the very final details. Who's excited? Raise your hands. Okay, so clear off your desk. We will not need the paints anymore. We will however, need our white medium. So again, I'm going to be using the Copic Opaque way. Feel free to use any white you have. So I am going to switch to my little tiny spot brush. It's my number, its size number one. And I am going to get it thoroughly wet. Lots of water. Dip it in to your white and splatter away and splatter on everything. It doesn't have to be just on the sky. Feel free to add some splatter to the moon. Remember, we like lots and lots of texture. So the key to having a really good amount of splatter is to have a good amount of water on your brush. So feel that brush up with water and splatter to your heart's content. Now, I like to let the splatter completely dry before moving on, but only because I tend to stick my hands in whatever I'm painting. So if you don't have that problem, It's not necessary. But if you do, then let it completely dry before continuing on with the details. So we're still using the same exact tools, the small spot brush and your whites. And we are going to start adding some striations to the moon. So the first thing that you should do is grab a paper towel and get rid of some of that water on your brush. We don't want this to be too bold and we also don't want it to be too watery. So with the Agile your paper towel, we'll just roll the very bottom of the brush against the paper towel and that'll suck up any of that extra water. Now, do you remember where we started that little tiny circle creator very early on when we're painting the moon. While this is, this is why we made that little circle greater. So using the very tip of the brush, we are going to make some curved lines coming out of the outer part of that circle. Now, use the very tip because we don't want these lines to be too thick. And make sure that you are following the curve of the moon because we want to retain the shape of the moon so we don't want fully straight lines. It's going to kind of take away from the effects of having this round 3D object in the sky. So make sure that you're following the curve of the moon as you are painting these lines. And it is okay if your brush skips in some areas. If you don't get a fully clean white curved line, it adds to the authenticity. If it has a little bit of skips. If they're not perfectly like straits, if they are different length, and if they are not all boldly white in, it just adds to it. So leave into all of these imperfections. And now as you see, I've made the, the really long ones across the entire base of the moon. And I'm going to go in, and I'm going to add a couple of short ones, a couple of thinner ones, and I'm going to vary them in length. Now once we're done making all of our little curve the lines, we are going to soften them up a bit. So using the same brush, completely clean it off, make sure that there is no white left on it and dab it against the paper towel so that you're not putting puddles of water on your paper. With the very tip again, go on the side of each of the lines and sort of scrub it just a tiny, tiny bit very, very gently. And the reason we're doing this is too soft in any of those really bold lines. Sometimes as much as we try to avoid those boys, those bold lines, they happen anyway. So if you have some really, really bold lines, soften them up by scrubbing the edges of the lines with your brush, but just make sure that you do it gently so that you're not lifting up any of the paint underneath. Now once you are done, softening those beautiful curves that you have created, you are done, we are done with this painting and look at how beautiful that comes out. Now, I don't want to have any borders on this piece, so I am going to cut off the white parts. You're not going to see that, but I have. So this is your final piece. I hope that you enjoyed this and I cannot wait to see all of the projects. And speaking of join me in the next session where we're going to talk about your projects. 7. Final Project: There are a ton of ways that you can incorporate some or all of the texts, techniques shown in this video today into your paintings. You can make them stands alone, incorporate them into landscapes, galaxies, journals, holiday themes. You can use them just a ton of different ways. So for your final project, I would love to see your unique take on a full moon illustration. Please leave them in the final project section. And I will be looking at each and every one of them and commenting on them if you can, and if you are on Instagram, please feel free to tag me at Vanessa underscore paints underscore so that I can comment and share. Thank you so, so much and I will see you very soon.