Transcripts
1. Class Introduction: Hello and welcome to my
Skillshare class where we will learn together how to paint
magical northern lights. Do you love the beauty
and enchantment that surrounds the
mystical northern lights? Have you wanted to try to paint these nighttime
landscapes, but don't quite know
where to start. In this class, we will
learn how to paint these vibrant Northern
Lights scenes using loose watercolor
techniques. My name is Madeline and
I teach watercolor on Skillshare, Patreon,
and YouTube. I'm also a brand ambassador for Paulina bright brushes and
all about art International. Today we are going to
learn how to paint a vibrant Northern Lights scene using loose watercolor
techniques. In this step-by-step tutorial, we'll explore the beauty
of the northern lights. Follow along with me as
I show you how to create three stunning landscapes using free flowing
watercolor techniques. This class has two beginner
friendly landscape tutorials with a third project
that is a little bit more geared towards
intermediate landscape artists. But whether you are
just starting out or needing some
inspiration to paint, there is something for
you here in this class. Thank you for
joining me and I am excited to meet you
in the next lesson.
2. All the Supplies: Let's go over the supplies
we will use in this class. I will be painting with 100%
cotton watercolor paper. The brand that I'm
using is Bao Han. This is a block of their
academy line paper, which is rough grain. It is very affordable
and I feel it is one of the better student
grade cotton paper options. 100% cotton paper allows for the best results with working
with wet on wet technique, which is painting
watercolor on wet paper. Either paint on the
block or I taped my paper to this plastic board right here with
some masking tape, is going to be important
in this class that you have the ability to
manipulate your paper, whether that is on the
block or on a board. I use several brands of paint. But the important
thing is not to use the same brands
of paint that I use, but the same colors. The three main colors
that we are going to be using in this class are indigo, phthalo green, and phthalo blue. While painting for
these classes, I experimented with the
colors yellow, green, and viridian to see which color it would get
me that really bright, iconic Northern Lights feel. And the winner was
the yellow-green. So while I do paint with viridian and some
of the lessons, if you can, I recommend exclusively using phthalo
green for the green. Watercolors have names. But what is actually more
important in determining, determining if you are using the correct color is actually
their pigment number, which is sometimes written
on sides of the tubes. If you look at the blue tube, it says Helio surface Julian. But the pigment number
is actually PB 153, which is the pigment number for phthalo blue while the
tube says cerulean, and you might be
thinking you're getting that kind of bright
granulating blue. This certainly is not so
really in this color is blue. So when you are choosing paints, it does help to know
the pigment numbers, at least for the fallow
blue and phthalo green. So while you certainly
do not need to research all the different brands
and their pigment numbers. Do be mindful of using the
colors that I recommend, which is primarily fallow
blue, phthalo green. And sometimes what's more
reliable than looking for the name of the actual color is to
find the pigment numbers. And if you look
through your paints, most sets do have
these colors in them. I will also be using a few other colors
in the last class, namely neutral tint, dioxazine, purple, and a azo yellow. And like I said earlier, I do use viridian and
two of the classes, but I recommend
using fallow green. I have a few palettes that
I use for mixing my paints. I have a small spray bottle. This spray bottle is very
important for the class because as we try to achieve that
movement in our sky, real wetting the paper with a flat brush could potentially
lift color from our sky. So to prevent accidentally
lifting any color, I recommend using
a spray bottle. I do also use some white
gouache four-star splatters, and I use a toothbrush
to get those splatters. I use masking fluid in
one of the classes. This is the brand of
masking fluid that I use. It is a very watery masking
fluid which I like. And I use it with
this ruling pen, which is basically
a pen to get the masking fluid from this
bottle onto my paper. I also use a gum eraser, which is just a little thing to scratch off masking fluid. If you don't have this, it is not completely necessary. You can also remove masking
fluid with just your fingers. I use a handful of brushes, but I mainly use a few round brushes
and a few mop brushes. I also use two different
liner or a rigger brushes for finer details and a flat
brush for wedding my sky. The sizing of watercolor
brushes can sometimes be confusing because they are not consistent from brand to brand. So I recommend using the size of brushes that match the
size of your paper. And the last thing I
want to point out is that this class is
very, very fun. We play with a lot of
free flowing watercolor, but it is also very messy. If you're like me and you
paint on a white desk, I want to point out
that our fellow colors, as bright and
beautiful as they are, can also be very staining. So I have this magic
eraser right here that I use to clean up my desk
after I'm finished painting. I do want to caveat that Magic erasers may not
be appropriate for wooden surfaces or any
type of nicer surface that has any kind of
sealant are finished. But if you're just painting
on a regular desk like me, the magic eraser is
really nice when it comes to cleaning off
stubborn watercolors. At the very end of our painting, all these supplies
will be listed on a slide at the
end of this lesson. You can pause it and
read through the list, but I will also make
the list available as a download in the resources
tab of this class.
3. Exercise: How to Use Masking Fluid: I want to talk really
quickly about masking fluid. What masking fluid
is a liquid latex or it's a liquid substance that one stride on
watercolor paper. You can paint over
it and it preserves the space that is covered
by the masking fluid. And so this is really
nice when we want to preserve white
parts of our paper. And so I just wanted to
show you how to use it. So masking fluid comes in several different brands and several different
types of consistency. This brand that I'm using
is on the water ear side. And I like that because
it's a little bit easier to apply and it dries a
little bit more quickly. So this is a ruling pen, and it's basically just
a metal pen that I can dip into this bottle
of masking fluid. And it will pick up some of the liquid so that
I can put it onto my paper. So if I make a few strokes
with the masking fluid, the nice thing about a
ruling pen is you can just grab a paper towel
or wet wipe and wipe it off and you don't
have to worry about masking fluid damaging your
paint brushes. If you do decide to apply masking fluid
with paint brushes, I recommend that you coat
the bristles of the brush very heavily with some
soap before dipping it in. Because if you were to dip just a brand new brush
into masking fluid, it will dry the brush and
essentially ruin the brush. So I'm going to dry this
masking fluid right here. I'll paint over it and then I'll show you how
to take it off. I also know that some
people don't think that you should try masking
fluid with a hot air tool. I will say that with this brand of masking
fluids, specifically, it is safe to dry the masking fluid
with the hot air tool. You just it would be
better to remove the masking fluid with a gum eraser. So I have my masking
fluid there. And I'm going to grab
my brush and pick up a little bit of paint and
paint over the masking fluid. I'm going to grab a hot air tool and I'm going to dry the paint. One very important thing to remember about using
masking fluid is that we want to always make sure
our paper is completely dry before we take the
masking fluid off. If the paper is damp in any way or the paint
isn't fully dried, then it can either
pull up paint or you could even ruin
the watercolor paper. So I'm going to take my gummy
eraser and I'm just going to erase the masking
fluid that I applied. And that is the beauty
of masking fluid. It preserves the
paper underneath and it allows us to paint
with really dark colors, yet still preserve the parts of the paper that we
want it to be white.
4. Exercise: How to Lift Watercolor Paint: Now I want to talk
about lifting paint. Lifting paint means that we are going to paint
a darker color. And when we lift paint, what we are doing is when
the paint is still wet, we take a brush, preferably a round brush. A brush that isn't too thirsty, but I'm going to dip my brush in water and
it's going to be clean. There's no paint on this, but I am drawing it so that there's not excess water in it, so this is just wet. And then what I'm gonna
do is I'm going to run this brush through the paint and lift
some of the color. So you can see how each time I go over the wet
watercolor with a clean, damp brush, it allows us to pick up some of that paint so
that it's not as dark. And this technique
is called lifting.
5. Mountain Top Lights: I am going to start
off by taping my 100% cotton watercolor paper down to our plastic
board right here. I want to walk through the
process that we will be using to capture the brightness
of our northern lights. We will be layering
our watercolors. We will start with the lightest, brightest color first,
dry that layer, and then layer darker
colors over it. By doing this, it allows us to preserve the brightness without the darker colors of our sky bleeding into the
lighter colors. Now, I am going to grab my water bottle and I'm
going to wet our paper, going to put our paints
onto our palate. So we have cerulean, blue, viridian, and indigo. I'm going to grab my mop brush. And we're going to grab
some of the viridian. And we're going to paint
the majority of our paper. And we want this
first swash to be pretty light because
this is going to be the light of the northern lights that we are going to
paint our sky over. So I am going to grab a paper towel to wipe
off the excess paint. And then I'm going to be using a hot air tool to
dry this layer. And the reason that we
want to wet our paper beforehand is so
that the colors, this color is going to
be on the lighter side. Alright, so now
I'm going to grab my hot air tool and
we're going to dry it. Now that this base
layer has dried, I'm going to grab my
spray bottle again. And I'm going to spray it a few times so
that it's a little bit wet. And then I'm going to
grab my round brush and we're going to pick up some of the Cerulean, Some right here. And then we're going to start spraying the blue
so that it runs. And this is how we get the
flow of our northern lights. And I'm gonna grab
some indigo as well and drop some over here. A few things I
want to point out. I am trying to drop darker color on damp
parts of my paper because it will move a
little bit more than if I were to put the color
on a dry spot of paper. That's why we sprayed the
paper lightly beforehand. Also, we are using
a spray bottle to wet the paper rather
than a flat brush. Because a flat brush could
potentially lift color off of the paper and we don't
want any color coming off. Also, notice where I
hold my spray bottle. Try to spray from maybe
five to 6 " away from the paper so that the
spray bottle does not have a lead dilute the color that
we're putting on the paper. And lastly, this is a very
messy watercolor project. It's very fun, very
loose, but very messy. At the end of this
Skillshare class, I will share some tips on how to clean your workspace afterwards, and some things you
can do to prepare your workspace
prior to painting. Also notice that I am tilting my board in a diagonal motion so that I can get the watercolor to move
in that direction. I want the upper parts
of my sky to be darker. So I'm adding indigo
to the very top. So now I'm gonna
get my hot air tool and I'm going to try this, but I want to be careful
to dry it evenly so that I don't get any pockets of
water pooling anywhere, creating some hard edges. Now that this layer is dry, I'm going to grab
my round brush and I'm going to pick
up just indigo. And I intentionally left the very bottom of our
landscape here lighter. I did not drop the
darker colors here. And I'm going to paint a
very loose mountain range in the background so that it has some contrast
with the light. So I'm gonna grab a little bit of indigo and we're going to
paint two mountain ranges. So the further one away is going to be a
little bit lighter. I rinse my brush in clean water. So it is just dry. I mean, it is just
wet with just water. And I'm going to lift
a tiny bit of color here from the mountains
to give it some light. I'm just going to lift
the color like that. I'm going to rinse my brush again so that there's
no color in it. I'm going to dab the
excess water off. I'm just going to lift. And then now I'm going to dry this first
layer of mountain. And now I'm going to grab
my round brush again. And we're going to grab a darker mixture of indigo for the mountain
range that is closer to us. And so I really like the
contrast of the colors. There's the darkness of the sky, the lights, there's
this brighter horizon. And the dark mountains
in the foreground make the landscape
itself feel brighter. So now I'm going to dry this last set of mountains and then we're
going to add some stars. I'm going to grab
a larger palette and some white gouache. I'm going to grab
my palette knife just to get some whitewash out and then add some water to it. My white gouache is really
old and I accidentally let the bottle sit out one time
with the cover, uncapped. The paint dried out
a little bit for me, so I'm just sort
of re-wetting it. If your gouache is newer than you don't, you
don't need to do this. You can just grab some gouache
and stick it on a pallet. So I have a toothbrush, which I like for making
very fine stars. I'm going to dip it like
this into the gouache. Then just sprinkle some stars and be careful to
cover your mountain. I did not cover my mountains. So I'm going to cover them now. And once everything
is fully dry, we can take our
masking tape off. There is our loose watercolor
northern lights sky.
6. Magical Forest Lights: I am going to start
off by taping off my paper with
some masking tape. If you are using a block, you can skip this step, but if you are just using
loose watercolor paper, make sure you tape it
to some sort of board, a plastic board preferably so that the paper does
not dry as fast. But we need our paper on some type of board
that we can move around and manipulate
so that we can work with our free
flowing watercolors. The first thing that
I'm gonna do is I'm going to wet my paper. And then I will paint our
first background wash. So I'm gonna grab my mop brush and I'm going to pick
up some yellow green. This first wash is going to be the light that we are going to see with our northern lights. Once we dry this layer, we're going to add our
darker sky on top of it. But we want this first layer
of paint to be very bright. And I'm going to dry this layer. That layer has dried. I'm going to grab
my spray bottle and I'm going to wet
our paper again. Now. I'm going to grab my
round brush and I'm going to grab some blue. And I'm going to
drop some here at the bottom along
with some indigo. And I'm going to start spraying our paper to
get that movement. I'm going to grab a
little bit more indigo. And I'm going to drop
more of that dark color. I'm making diagonal strokes so that my paints flow
in that diagonal manner. I'm going to grab a paper towel to pick up some of this color. I'm going to grab a little
bit more indigo and I'm going to darken the
tops of our sky. I really liked the color
and the movement of this. So I'm going to dry this layer. Now that our sky layer is dry, I'm gonna grab a
liner or rigger brush and I'm going to pick
up some more indigo. We're going to paint some trees. I'm going to make
a downward line. I'm going to wet the
brush a little bit, grab some creamy or paint. And I'm gonna make
some zigzag lines. And I'm going to rub
the belly of the Liner, brush down to paint the
width of the trees. Again, I'm starting with a trunk and the very
tops of the tree. There are not a lot branches. And then as we get down more, I take the belly of the rigor or liner brush and I move
it down like this. I sort of add some spikier, um, tree stems bottom. I'm going to paint one
more on this side. Then I'm going to paint
some over here in front of this lighter part of our sky. When we paint our darker trees in front of the lighter
Northern Lights, the contrast of the
trees actually makes the trees field darker and
our sky feel brighter. He's out just a little bit. And I'm going to paint one more over here on
the right side. If the body of your tree
feels a little bit too light as you are painting it using the belly of your
rigor or liner brush. You can just pick up some
darker color and drop it in the lighter parts of the
tree like I'm doing right here to give it more color. And I really liked those trees, so I'm going to dry this layer. And now that it's fully dry, we can take our
masking tape off. And this is our magical
forest lights landscape.
7. Northern City Lights: We are going to start
off by sketching out our mountains and dropping
in some masking fluid. So I'm going to start with my mountains sort
of in the middle. I'm going to roughly
sketch it out. So I have mountains sort of
in the midground right here, with some ocean space
left, right here. I'm going to grab
my masking fluid. This is the brand
that I like to use. And I'm going to
grab a ruling pen, which is just something to
apply the masking fluid. I'm going to dip my pen in
and we're going to paint some little lights
because this is going to be the village
lights of the village. Now I'm going to dry this
tiny layer of masking fluid. I'm going to add some paints
to our paint palettes so we have the colors that
we used from before. I'm going to add a
little bit of dioxazine purple and a little
bit of neutral tint. And I don't have that much
room on my palette left, but I'm also going to be
using some raw sienna. And I have that on a
palette right here. So now I'm going to
grab my flat brush with some clean water and we
are going to wet our sky. I'm basically going to paint water from the tops of
the mountain upwards. I'm going to grab my mop
brush and I'm going to drop in some green rather than covering
the whole thing in green like we did last time, I'm going to leave some whitespace so that it
looks a tiny bit brighter. I'm also going to grab
some of the purple. So I painted some
green and some purple, and I've left some whitespace to give the background sky a
little bit more brightness. And now I'm going to dry this layer with
the hot air tool. Now we're going to
go into drop in darker color like we did
with the first piece. We're going to be dropping color at the tops of the mountains. I'm going to be slanting my block with the
top of our sky, leaning down towards my table, I'm going to try to keep
the mountains white and I'm going to try to
keep the darkness of the sky limited to the sky. So I'm going to spray our paper. And I'm gonna grab
my round one again and pick up some indigo. And I'm going to mix
in a little bit of neutral tint so that
it's a little darker. And I'm going to
start right here and let the color flow down. So again, with this
type of painting, it's pretty difficult to know
where the paint will go. And that's part of the fun, is letting the watercolor
have a mind of its own and letting it go
where it wants to go. I'm trying to leave some
parts of the sky lighter and letting the paint
move on the paper is what is going to bring
that movement to your sky. When you're spraying, you want to be careful not to spray. It's so close to the
paper that we're actually taking watercolor off. I like how that looks. I'm
going to rinse off my brush and grab a paper towel and
pick up all this excess paint. I want the corners of my sky
to be a little bit darker, so I'm going to grab
some more indigo and just drop some color. I'm just making some
downward brushstrokes to sort of give that
illusion of movement. I'm going to tilt
the paper one more time and let that paint flow. Pick up that excess paint. And I'm going to grab my hot air tool and we're
going to dry the sky. I am going to finish
off the sky and add some star splatters before
you move on to the mountain. So I'm gonna grab my
white gouache and my toothbrush and
lightly splatter. Some stars. It's very faint, but
you can see them. I like them to be on
the smaller, finer end. And then now I'm going to paint
the tops of the mountain. I'm gonna grab neutral
tint and my round brush. And we're going to loosely
paint these mountains. I'm just making quick soft
brush strokes downwards, allowing for some whitespace
to show the snow. As we paint the mountain, we want to make sure to keep this tiny area right here where our masking fluid is clear and to not
paint over the city. Because we will be painting
it with a brighter color later to help reflect
the lights of the city. I like how that looks. And now I'm going
to clean my brush off and grab some
of this raw sienna. And I'm going to
paint over where we had our masking fluid. This isn't quite bright
enough for my liking. So I'm gonna grab something
a little bit more yellow. I'm going to grab
some azo yellow. I'm going to put some azo yellow where our masking fluid is. Then I'm going to
wash my brush so that it's just clean water. And I'm going to
just pull that out. And then I'm going to take a wet paper towel
and I'm going to just dab at it so
that it looks bright. Like there's lights
there but not that. It's painted on. I'm going to dry
that. I'm going to grab a larger mop brush. And I'm going to pick up some of the indigo neutral tint
and some of the Cerulean. It's going to be this dark blue. And I'm actually going to grab a flat brush and I'm going to
wet the bottom right here. I want the paper wet so
that I can lift the color. So we're going to
paint the ocean. I'm going to add a
little bit more indigo. I want it a little bit darker. I'm going to make
the very bottom, the landscape a
little bit darker. And I'm going to make the
right side a little bit darker because there
are no city lights on the right side. So now I'm going to grab
my smaller mop brush. I'm going to rinse it off
so that there's just water. And I'm basically going to
move downwards like that. Actually I'm going to
use it. I'm going to use a round brush on my lines to look
a little softer. I'm just going to
scrub this line right here tiny bit because it
looks really sharp to me. Okay. So I like that and I'm just going to add a little bit more color back
to the bottom right here. So now I'm going to
dry this water layer. Now that those layers are dry, I'm going to grab a gum eraser and we're going to wipe off the masking fluid from earlier. And we have the white
lights of our city. I'm going to grab my liner
brush and some of the indigo. I'm just going to give this
coastline some definition. I want to make it seem like
there are some buildings. But it's all very suggestive. Just want some lines. You want a very fine
brush for this, I would recommend
a liner because these brushstrokes
are very, very tiny. And that is our final piece. I just love the
movement of the sky, and I love the brightness
of the city and how the lights of the city
are reflected in the ocean.
8. Cleaning Up: So if you have finished
painting for the day and you try to wipe off all the
paint that fell on your desk, you may find that
some of the paint, especially from the fellows, does not come off with a paper towel or even with
a little bit of soap. And so like I
recommended earlier, I use a big piece
of magic eraser. I cut a little bit off
and then I dip it in water and scrub at
little paint stains. And they usually all come off. Again. I wouldn't use this on
any nice wooden surface. I also wouldn't paint on really nice surfaces
as this is very messy. But this is something that
helps clean my plastic desk. And don't forget to check
out the last class where I share how you can find
resources for this class, as well as how to create your own project and
leave my class or review.
9. Resources for Your Class Project: Thank you for taking my
class here on Skillshare. I really hope you
enjoyed this class. Now, it's your turn to create your own Northern
Lights masterpiece. I want to help you navigate
the Skillshare page a little bit so that you can see all of the resources available to you. If you head over to the
project and resources tab, on the right-hand side, you will see a list of
downloads available to you. Included is a final list of all the supplies that
I used in this class, as well as the final pieces
of all the paintings. If it would be
helpful for you to have it as a reference point, feel free to download it here. And when you're ready, don't forget to upload
a class project. I would love to see your work. You can do so by
hitting the green tab that says Create
Project right here. I would also really appreciate it if you
left me a class review. You can do that by clicking the leave Review
button right here. And you can find this
under the reviews tab. Class reviews really help the Skillshare
Algorithm know that students are enjoying
this class and it'll recommend it
to more students. And if you enjoyed this class, don't forget to check out the other classes that I
have here on Skillshare. And lastly, feel free to
find me on social media. I'm on Instagram, TikTok, as well as YouTube. Thank you again.
Madeline Kerrii, Watercolor Artist
