painting watercolor moons

1. trailer: Hi there. This class is creating moons in watercolor. This class will give you a primer on the wet-on-wet technique and how to use it, and then we'll move on to tips and tricks for creating your circle outlines and different methods you can use to create these metallic effects. Then, we'll move on to look at this reference material that I've compiled for you, and create your own illustrations of two of these moons. We'll go through those step-by-step, and then we'll finish off with creating our own fantasy moons. So if this sounds interesting to you, enroll now. 2. intro: Hi there, I'm Arun K. Archer. I'm a watercolor illustrator and this class is creating watercolor moons. It really came about after I had done a previous Scotia class, which you can check out if you'd like. I'll make sure to link it in the class description. It is galaxies and starscapes in ink and watercolor. Then I've been doing a lot of starry moons, and starry landscapes, and adding a fantasy moon into those. So I thought that this could make a good supplement to that class. If you haven't taken that one already, I'd recommend that. I just used some of the techniques, but not all of them so they can really stand alone, but I'd recommend both. Let's get right into the class. 3. supplies & primer on wet on wet technique: For supplies, you will need a spray bottle. This is an old perfume bottle that I used because it's a little bit prettier, but just the kind that you'd use to water plants will work just as well. Then you'll need masking tape, paint, of course, watercolor paint. You can use cheap or expensive. I'll leave a couple of links in the projects, notes about the kinds of paints I like to use. This as a bit of an expensive one by Sennelier, but I also like a few that are pretty inexpensive as well. Then we'll need water, and a paintbrush, and a paper towel. Then for paper, you want to make sure you have at least a 140 pound paper and I recommend at least 25 percent cotton or more. Then that really cuts down on how much buckling you have. Then I also recommend cold press paper because it has a little bit more texture, and a hot press paper is smooth. That's what we're going to do for supplies. Now, we're going to do a primer on the wet-on-wet technique. Another note about the paper is that hot press paper is less absorbent than cold press, so another reason that I recommend cold press paper is because when you use a lot of water on hot press paper, it just leaves puddles all over it and doesn't create really good shapes. We're going to look at a few different ways for creating shapes using the wet-on-wet technique. The first thing I'm going to do is create a little square here with just water. Only water in this. We're going to let this dry a little bit and then I'll show you how that looks when the paper's not quite glossy anymore. That's a good thing to just let it sit for a minute. Then I'm going to take a brush that is not very wet, that has quite a bit of pigment, and do just a dry brush here. You can see how even the tip point of my brush, I can bring that out and have that shape stay exactly where I put it. That's dry brush on dry paper. Next, we're going to do a really wet brush. We really dip it into the water. Dip it into the paint. You'd see wet brush on dry paper still spreads out a little bit, but mostly stays wherever you put it. Just a little bit of spreading out. Do a little bit more of that. Now that this has set for a little bit, it's a little bit glossy if I turn my head to the side where my lights are pointing on it for the most part. It has really knotted up. I'm going to take some paint and move this through, and you can see how the pigment moves around a little bit in a soft, but it doesn't really spread out of that shape. In the final technique, I'm going to wet my brush and wet this area of the paper, and then I'm going to use a wet brush into the pigment and let this just fine out. You can see how it just spreads and really has a mind of its own. A little note about that is the wet-on-wet technique is really unpredictable. You don't really have a choice from where it's going to go, and you can't really get it the same each time because not only is the water-to-pigment ratio really important, but different parts of your atmosphere can make a difference like the humidity, that sort of thing, the thickness of your pigment, the paper absorbency. The fun is letting the paint go where it will and creating really natural effect looking like that. Then afterwards, you can give definition to the shape that happens. Another aspect of wet-on-wet that is important is if you are doing a shape, like in this class, we're going to be doing a lot of circles, and you're having a hard time seeing where the wet-on-wet is, but we need to have a circle for our moons and you can't see where you're supposed to be painting, you can add the tiniest bit of paint, the same color if you have it, but if you don't, it's not really a big deal. You can see here how this is a lot more visible and we're going to cover it up anyway. It's not a big deal to have a different color in there. Then you can use this to spread out paint in wherever. That's your primer on wet-on-wet. It's one of those techniques that really it's more about you getting used to, how it feels under your hand, and where you think the paint will go when you press your brush down depending on how wet you have your paper. We'll go through a few more tricks as we go along, but these are the basics. 4. outline tips: Next we're going to talk about a few different ways to create your circle outline before we go in with our moons, and it really helps to use a really light pencil. I like to use a mechanical pencil because we won't be covering up and, or erasing these after we have our outlines all painted in. Obviously if you have a compass, the kind you use for math class, that will work the best, but if you don't become compass, you can also use a bobby pin. This is one that I like to use if I don't have anything else around because I almost always have one in my hair, so what you do is you put it at like 7 o'clock here and hold it in the middle of where your circle will be. With your pointer finger, put your pencil into the loop. Go towards your hand first because it's really hard to get under. Then just go around. Now I just close it up at the bottom. It's pretty decent circle, but a better way to do it, which is just a little bit more limited as far as size goes is to use a mason jar, so you can just go inside here. I didn't press hard enough. A perfect little circle there. These are both really good techniques for this. Of course, you have a need for different size, you can use your masking tape. There's a good circle right there. There's plenty of things you can use, your just use all of the different mugs and cups and everything that you have. This is how you can create a nice circle outline for your mitts. Now we can move onto actually painting. 5. earth's moon - full & crescent : Now we're going to do our first moon. I have gone ahead and redrawn this bit using my masking tape. This is going to be just our simple earth moons, like walk you through how you can use the wet-on-wet technique to do this. We don't need pencil anymore. But I've got my paper towel just in case. The first thing you're going to do is take your brush and your water, and make a good layer around the circle and try to stay in the lines as much as you can. It helps to look at this in an angle so you can see the glossiness or you can add a tiny bit of pigment, so you can see where your paint is going or your water. If you're worried it's better to stay a little bit within the line. You can always add a little bit of embellishment on the sides to make it rounded out. But it's much harder to cover it up if you go outside of the circle. We're going to go ahead right now and do the same thing as we did on wet-on-wet technique. We don't want to wait for this to dry because we'll lose a little bit of looseness that comes with that. For our own moon, you can always do whatever colors you want but I usually go in with a blue, and I'm going to darken it up with some other colors. I'm just going to use Payne's gray, which is just like a neutralish color, warm gray, and adding a little bit of dark blue as well. I'm going to make sure my brush is really wet and has a lot of pigment in it. Here's the magic you're just are going to take your brush, and press down where you want your craters to go. I'm looking at a picture of the moon or earth-moon that I have created this little PDF of references for you. This is just going to be our full moons so I'm going through wherever we have craters, and letting them spread out as they're not too perfect. If you start doing this and you're like, "Wow, this looks really terrible." Give yourself a moment, step back for a moment let it completely dry after you do your first layer and you might come back and be really surprised by how it looks. It's the nature of water color that you can't really control it, but you can coax it. If you don't like it a lot of the times when you come back it looks really different, so it's good to not be too attached. Here I have my first layer. I'm going to leave it like this and let it dry a little bit. But I won't bore you with that. I will in the meantime, show you how to do the similar thing, but on a waxing crescent. That's like the Cheshire Cat Moon. We're going to take our brush and you can either bring your masking tape back, and do another circle which actually I think I will show you. You want to just have the overlapping, and just trace along the outer curve. Now you can see that really perfect line. I'm going to go ahead and take my brush and just wet inside of this. You can see now how I have a little bit paint left in my brush and that's not a huge deal because, we're going to paint over it anyway, and it makes it really easy to see where we've gone. Got a little bit more water. Then I'm going to do the same thing take the Payne's gray and blue combination. I'll darken this one up a little bit too. I'm going to just go through this and create some craters. You can see how nice that springy spreads out. Then I'm going to go ahead and take darker colors like really dark black blue to fill in this part. If you want this line to stay really clean, make sure you don't touch it. If you want it to blend together, then you can touch your brush to it. You can see how I touched the surface there it's burnt together. But, I really like that effect so as long as it doesn't bother you, doesn't bother me. Something that's really important that I see a lot when I see people painting moons is that, they'll do stars all over the place and it'll look really beautiful but then, they do stars in this part of the moon and it's just wrong because you can't see stars through the moon. You think about when you see a crescent moon it's actually just this part of the moon is facing away from the earth so you can't see it. The dark half it's not just disappeared and only this part of the moon has been left like someone's been taking bites out of it, so it's really important to me. I guess, stylistically doesn't matter but scientifically it does. You can't have stars in this area of the moon it got to stay on the outside. We're going to let this dry too. I'm going to go back to the top moon because I noticed that these little petals, I was trying to escape my circle. I'm going to take my paper towel and just dab them away. It hasn't dried very much, but I am going to go in with my darker color and just deepen up those. Well, it still as really soft. If I see any parts where I missed having the wetness of the paper go all the way to the circle, I'm just adding that in right now. At this point you can either wait for this to dry and we'll come back for the next layer or you can use a small hairdryer and just run over your piece, make sure you do it perpendicular so you're not moving a paint around, but that really helps as far as drawing things out quicker. But I will come back as soon as these are dry. It's been about 15 minutes and I just want to show you how this has dried to give you a really nice feather and some nice crater shapes. Yes, I do not have a blue drier permanently, honestly should invest in that, but, saving electricity I suppose. Even though this isn't completely dry we're going to go back in with another layer. You can wait if you'd like. But sometimes you want to add another white on that layer and I think in this case, we could use a little bit more texture. I'm going to go ahead and take my brush, and add a little spot, and add water going through. Now I'm basically using just water to wet my circle all over again, just so I can see where it's going. Then I'm going to take a really wet brush and pigment, drop it in. You can use different colors. I've actually included in the reference sheets that I've given you different kinds of moons and mythology and different moons in our solar system of course, but different moons for actually the Earth's Moon, for example, like the Harvest Moon, usually appears towards the autumnal equinox and it rises really low in the sky during harvest season, and it looks really yellow or orange. Then we also have the blue moon, which isn't actually blue is just supposed to be the second full moon in a month. But I think that as a painting could look really nice like a bright blue moon. You can really experiment with that. Other thing I'd like to do is add a bit of yellow, which I'll probably do once we go on our details, but right now we're still doing the base. I'm just going to stick with this blue. Again just make sure everything's really wet so that it can spread out of its own accord. There. I think that'll look really nice. I'm just going to go ahead and take my towel and crumple it up so there's more texture in it in going into this puddle, because I can tell that's basically never going to dry. There. That's looking pretty good. Then do the same on the moon or the waning crescent. Let me go ahead and do that. First I'm going to go over this and don't worry because, something you have to remember about watercolors is that it always dries lighter than what it looks like at first. You feel like I don't want to cover up the nice pattern that I've gotten from my first layer, you just have to make sure that you know you're not using too much paint yet but for the most part you are going to be able to see it underneath. I've got my crescent all mapped in, I'm just going to take this and create small craters with my dark paint. You can see here even though the paint wants to it just stays right in where the wet is so if you've gotten a tiny little corner, it just stays right there which is really nice. I'm going to do the same thing on this moon and just dab it. Or the petals have gotten a bit much. Do the same thing here because in reality, this other side of the moon would be completely black or at least black enough so it's blocked away. You can see in this diagram from NASA that you can still see a little bit of the different craters and everything, but it's faded away. I'm going to try to create that. I'm just going to take my dark paint, go through this off half. Go so then that's all filled in. Now I take some black paint, some really dark blue paint and just spot there a few craters, shadow craters. I darken some of these up too. See that's turning out really nice. Then I'm going to darken up a little bit of this as well now that it's dried a little bit. If you look at the reference pictures of our moon, depending on which way you're looking at it, the ones that I'm looking at, it's darker on this half. Spotted out like little countries or something there. Then it fades away over here. Show you what I mean. See, the country is here and then it spots away. All right, let this dry completely and then we'll come back and do our details on the top. Now we've got everything together. We can move on to the fun part which is embellishment. You can see now that this has dried completely. We've got some nice marbling in here and it's spread out doing it's own thing. My favorite thing to use here is my Finetec palette. I have this set of golds and silvers and I believe this one's actually even called moonlet silver which is perfect for this project. Also, I have this Finetec palette that is pastel colors. I've got a green, orange, purple, yellow, pink and blue. I will of course link these both. I've done a tutorial on how to use these already in my unusual tools for watercolors class. I'm going to go ahead and gloss over that. We're just going to use this silver. It's already been wet a little bit but we're going to go ahead and go over our moon one more time and another layer of water. Same over here. I'm going to only do it on this part because that's where the light would really be and this attract the light, to say the least. I'm going to go ahead and pick up pigment from this silver and drop it in. I'm going to add another drop of water so that it spreads the pigment out. I'm going to go ahead and take you in close to view this. Here for matters, I love it. Too pretty therapeutic technique. You can see I'm just literally laying my brush down and letting this pigment flow to where it ever may go. We're going to go back up to the top. I've done my first layer here of the silver. I'm going to go back and with a little bit of mix of the silver and the champagne gold, to just add a little bit of depth to that shine. It's difficult to see from the angle of the camera. [inaudible] if I take a light and I shine it on here, you can see our nice reflection that Finetec palette gives you. I'm going to add a little bit more, adding in some champagne gold. I'm going to film this at the same time with my phone so that you can get a good picture of what it looks like close-up, these same exact strokes. Here we go, I'm just going to press my button shutter. See how nice that's starting to look.I'm going to add a few more spots around here. Really creating these moons is all about having the layers. You could honestly go on layers forever and ever but I usually think about two to three is good. It's easy to go overboard though especially once you start using the Finetec paints. Now we have our fine taste. We're going to let this dry again and then we're going to come back for our final embellishments. Now this is completely dry and you can see how shiny it is which is really nice especially when you look at it from different angles. The different colors make really nice effect too. But of course if you don't want to do the Finetec pallets, you can always build up another layer using your paints. If you're going to do that I just recommend you start with a lighter base than what I've done here. But then we're going to do our final step which is just our embellishments. I have a gold pen here and also a white one. These are just regular gel pens that I bought at Blik. What we're going to do here is create the final bits of our craters here. I'm just going to go through this and spider them out. You want to start from a center point, I'm choosing right here and you spider that out. It looks really nice too to add one where you have no gold paint because the thin lines make a big difference. I'm just going to add a few of those with the gold, just little starburst pieces. Then after that I'll go on with my white pen. You can see how that gives us some real depth. I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing on this moon but stay away from the dark part just because we want that to fade optically for your viewers. You don't want this to be the focal point. Adding a few of the white and a couple of the gold. If you're going in and then you're doing the harvest moon or the blue moon, that kind of thing, you could always switch this up, just stick with the white or you could go out and get a blue gel pen, metallic one and all those look really good. Honestly, these pens are really nice and I definitely recommend them. I use them to sign my work and of course to make moons. I'm just going to make sure everything looks balanced. Those are really our moons done. At this point if you want to embellish more, you can always do so. Something I recommend as well, if you want to get a little bit crazy, is to use holographic glitter. I have this one from an Etsy shop. Sometimes I'll use this and just dab it into the paint when it's so wet or use it with a tiny bit of glue. I'd recommend stick glue because it doesn't last as long and you're not going to use a ton of glitter.This usually just works just to pat it on. I'm going to sign this. It's complete. You could also go around and add some stars if you want to dip into your water again and just add a little bit of a background in here you can do that. If you want more of a primer on how to create skies and starry skyscapes, I've done a whole class on how to create galaxies. I'll be sure to link that. Here we have the finished piece. You can see how beautiful that shine looks. Next we can move on to some different types of moons. 6. moons from our solar system: So I've cleaned up my workspace a little bit so we can go through two different moons, but first, we're going to go through this PDF that I've created for you. These are all different moons in our solar system and our moon in its different forms. First up, we have the moon, the earths only moon which we've already done and then on the back page, we have all of the different phases of the moon so you can see how those look and where you shouldn't put stars, so that's important. Then next we have a few of the most beautiful moons that I've done through a little bit of research. I'm not going to try to pronounce this one, I think it's Ganymede, it's one of Jupiter 67 moons. This is Callisto, one of Jupiter 67 moons again, and then Lo, which has a high sulfur content which gives it this really bright yellow shade. Then this is Europa, which is made up mostly of frozen water, so it kind of has that really smooth look and it's really icy looking which was really beautiful. Then this is actually a composite shot of Titan, a few different phases of it so that it makes this really cool gradient effect. Titan is one of Saturn's moons. Dione is one of Saturn's moons as well and it has a lot of canyons and walls and then it looks like a marble when you pull away and look at that from space. Then Titania, one of your Uranus' 27 moons, Oberon again, and then Triton is one of Neptune's moons. So these are just a few that I've pulled, there's of course a million and I've also included my sources where I've gotten these from so you're going to be able to look up and see if there's any that are your favorites and you can just play with this and make sure you get exactly what you want and create your own moons, really the sky is the limit, but if you'd like to have real references and I know I do, especially when I'm learning something new, this can be great reference for you. Then I also like we've discussed before, have the blood moon, the Blue Moon and the Harvest Moon and just a little bit of information behind those. I'm going to walk you through two more moons so that we don't just do Earth's moon because that would be boring. I'm going to go and do Callisto and Titan, and we're just going to go ahead and do kind of like an abstracted view of these and just make it beautiful. I'm going to go ahead and do two big circles with my bobby pin method here. This one's terrible, I'm going to do that one again. The teacher can't be bad and Lazy. The trick to using the bobby pin method is to start it right under your finger. There. That's good. We've got our two circles here and I've taped down these just so that I have a flat workspace and it's not jumping around for you, but we're going to do very similar to what we've done before and I'm going to go into my water, which is now pretty tinted blue and are not going to change it because it will be easier for me to see what has been wet at this point. That one's going to be Titan and this one is going to be Callisto. Now that they're both wet, I'm going to go into my paint and at first the professor has kind of like a bluish tint on the outside and then it fades into kind of pink-green tense, so I'm going to start with a brush that's really what and full of different shades of blue and just let that spread around. Just notice the part that I missed, so I'm going to take what brushing and just move that in there because you know we're going to do a million layers anyway. Then I'm going to take some pink and mix it up with some browns and some blacks to this muddy it up a little bit so it's not too bright. I'll take that and I'm going to press it down here and I will again do a video so you can see how it looks up close. This one's already starting to dry up, so I'm going to go ahead and add a little bit more around here, just put in the water. So now we're going to add some green-yellow tones too, them I'll do the same thing. I'm going to mix up some greens and yellows together and then add a little bit of brown to just muddy it out a tiny bit so it's not so bright and in your face. I'm just going to add a little dot of that there. You can see here how it's starting to dry in little crater shapes which is really nice. We're going to leave that one and obviously this has dried up so we're going to wet tighten up again. I'm going to use the reference picture of Titan, I know it's a composite shot, but it's so beautiful so we'll just paint a composite Titan. I'm going to start out with a bright yellow and are not going to muddy this guy up because Titan isn't messing around with its colors. There we go. That's a very satisfying color bleed. I will go ahead and when I do my next color, which is going to be blue-green, again, not muddied up, I will do a close up video for you as well. I'm just mixing together a bright blue and a medium green, making sure I have a really went brush. I'm just going to go along with the yellow. You can see how those have really blended together, which is really nice. Then the next thing I'm going to do is take the same blue that I used to mix up that blue-green color, and just take that, and use that to blend the green to the edge. You can see how the movement of the paint really takes care of everything by itself. I'm really liking how this is turning out so far, but this paddle right here is concerning me. I feel like it's going to escape the boundaries of my circle, and we're losing the effect of the craters here, so I'm just going to go ahead and lightly tap my really crumply paper towel. That's important to have that really be crumply because that's how you get that nice texture. We have Callisto a little bit blended out and dried up a little bit. I'm just going to go in and add a few more dots of this darker blue. Now that it's dried up a little bit more, you can see how the paint doesn't move quite as far. You can really move that to your advantage if you want to create a bunch of little craters because Callisto is really dotted with them. I'm just going to take a dark blue. I am going to dot all over. If you dot a place and it's not wet, you can just take your brush and smudge it out so that it's not as such a harsh circle. Let this guy dry a little bit. Titan here still is pretty wet, but we're going to go in and just add another layer of color while it's still all loose. I'm going back with a blue-green, this time I'm darkening it up, and I'm just going to add some depth here. I'm just looking at the picture here and I'm noticing that there's some squiggly lines around where the blue becomes yellow and so I'm just going to add this exaggerated line here, maybe there's a canyon in there. I don't know. But it looks like it can be something like that and I'll just drop some water in these pieces. I'm also going to deepen up the blues and the greens in Titan as well. Well, we still have a little bit of wetness to play with. I'm also noticing as I'm looking more at the picture that there's a little hint of red-orange in the top of Titan here, so I'm just going to take my brush and add this in. You can use a little bit water. I'm just going to spread it all out. I'm going to let both of these guys dry and I'll come back for another layer of wet on wet. These have tried really nicely, this one's gone really nice marbling technique which is looking really good and then this one's really soft, nice, and tie-dye. I'm going to go and do two different techniques on these two different guys. For Callisto, I'm going to start with a wet brush but instead of filling that in all the way, I'm going to add a little bit more structure by just doing a bit of a wash around it. This you can see already how it's spreading the paint out and then when I start doing more paint on top, it will stay in these areas instead of filling in your whole circle. Again, you'll want to just put your head to the side so you can see which parts are shiny. Then I'm going to in with blues and greens and purples and all those other beautiful colors in this one. I'm just touching the brush to paper, letting it spread out on its own volition. I'm going to darken it up too and some of them. This is looking a little bit more like Callisto now because it's pretty dark underneath all those beautiful colors. For this one, the fine touch will really bring it home because it has a lot of sparkling top. I'm really liking how this is looking, I'm going to leave this one and I'm going to go to the other now that it has its own drying to do, round two. I just have to get rid of these dots that didn't have any water underneath them because they're too harsh. Well, that looks pretty good. Okay, so I'm going to leave this guy. Next, we're going to go over to this one and we're going to just keep working with that marbling technique and I'm just going to add a little bit more color to these areas that have become desaturated because really I think had enough faded over in this top, I probably wouldn't have done anymore. I'm just going to add a little bit more to this line right here and make sure it's really fuzzed out, so we can keep on marbling it all. I'm just dropping water in there and I'm also going to take some more yellow paint and drop it into the middle so it's not too harshly orange. I'm going to do the same thing over here, but instead of doing the orange, I'm going to do the yellow to blue. There's yellow there then I'm going to take a combination of different blues that I have going just dotted in. There we go. You can see how that one's already spreading, I'm just going to add another depth here. That will spread it into the wet paint. That's something about wet on wet that just comes with practice. Knowing where the paint is going to flow and you can't always know everything, so you're going to just have to work with what you have afterwards. Easier said than done, absolutely. I'm going to mix a blue-purple and add a little bit of black to it and just add a little bit of depth to Titan here because that line we've done before has faded away. Such as the nature of watercolors. I'm a little bit concerned about that puddle up there because first of all, I know it will never dry, and second of all, it's starting to make my paper buckle a little bit which is just a hazard of working with not super expensive paper. I'm just going to dab this away and this makes pretty cool effect. I'm going to do that around the circle. All right, so I'm really liking how these are looking at so far as. I will let these dry and then we'll come back to do embellishments. We're mostly dry at this point and our bases are looking really good. They're nice and lovely and have a lot of texture. I'm going to go ahead and move on to the Finetec. I've already gone ahead and sprayed my little pastel palette here. These paints are really nice, but you have to know how to use them. They really don't show up well, if you don't have color underneath. You can match the color, like I can use this blue to be in the blue here, but it also looks really nice to layer over different colors, so to layer this blue over this orange. I'll do a little bit of each. The first thing I'm going to do is just add a little bit more water here. You know the drop by now. I'm going to add some water and then add some paint and let it do its thing. I'm going to go ahead and take another video at the same time, so you can see this close up. But I'm going to dip into this blue first, and then I'm going to touch down. Not quite enough water going yet. You can see how it's holographic. We'll do it some more. I'm going to add some pink this time. This is starting to look really nice. I'm just going through here making sure everything is blended out. I'm going to add some yellow as well. Now, I'm mixing it to blue and green, because crystal is really a colorful moon. Then I'm going to go ahead and go back to the finetec palette we did for the first moon and add in some silver. I just feel like silver really completes the moon especially for this one, which has so many dots of what looks like light. I'm even doing this when it's not wet anymore, just to add those more structured spots. I'm really liking how that looks. I'm going to go back to titan here and I'm just going to do a little bit here because you don't really see as much of the light as you do for crystal. So I'm going to just add a little bit of orange and yellow to these spots here. Over here hasn't actually dried all the way yet, so I'm going to be a little bit careful about it so I don't rub away all that texture, but just tapping in a little bit more. Then I'll add a little bit of blues and purples here, a little bit of pink, and then I'll polish it off. Just a bit more silver for both. I'm going to let these both dry completely so we can come back to do our final embellishment with our pens. Now, that everything is dry, we're going to go in with our gold and our white pen and just do our last little craters just like we did for our original moons. I'm just going to scatter them around, just to add those final bits of texture. Feel free to experiment with where you put your craters because technically, if you look at this reference photo that I'm working from there aren't any, but I'm just spreading them around so that they look natural and random. Some of them are coming up from the sides and they're all perfect. That's really important when you're creating these moons. I'm varying size too. You can see this one's pretty small and then I'm really bringing this one out to be a larger crater. If you want, you can use a black pen here. That'd work as well. I'm just going to do a couple more small ones on titan here, a really little one. I think actually I'm going to add a little bit more white just around to brighten it up. This texture here has come out really nice. I really like that. I'm going to do the same thing over here on crystal. Actually, just to stay close to what crystal actually looks like, I'm going to do a bunch of really small craters. That's what it looks like to me on the reference pictures. Just a bunch of really tiny craters. I'm just switching back and forth between the pens till I have what I like. Now actually I'm going to go in with some white lines here too. This is still wet, but whatever there, so I'm stay away from it. As if that's a good reason. Definitely invest in a hairdryer if you can. That makes it much quicker. Now we have here our crystal and titan complete. I'm just going to sign the both of these guys. That's our work for all these different moons. 7. creating fantasy moons: Now I'm going to do a quick overview of creating some fantasy moons. I've gone ahead and created my outline and erase it a little bit so it will be too prominent. Then I'm just going to go in and use whatever colors I please. I've got here an orange, and a blue, and a red, and just dabbing those away, just like you've seen before, and then let those dry just a little bit so that I can have a lighter wash of that spreading out color. Next, I'm going to use another trick from my unusual tools class and get just regular old vodka and use this to create these craters. I'm using a really cheap vodka and just dipping it in and adding that here and you can see how it really spreads out and creates really cool effects. You can also use rubbing alcohol if you don't have vodka around. Now they're blending together and getting really marbury and I'm just getting my fine tech palettes ready here and I'm going to let this dry a little bit more before I go in with those. I'm adding the wash with the fine techs, just like you've seen before, and I'm using the yellows over the yellow pea and the silvers over everything, and then just mashing up those colors and then putting some pinks over the blues and seeing what different color combinations that gives me. In another layer of paint and this time I'm going in with a darker color just to deepen things up, and this is a darker purply blue. I'm just going to dot those all over the place and let that spread out and create craters. Now that everything is dried up, I'm going to go in with my pen and just create all the detailing. I've actually use a different pen here which is a Pentel waterproof pen, that is blue metallic and then I'm going in also with the white just like we've done before and the golds is to create the craters. Then I've added a few more with the fine tech colors, but here's the finished piece. One more fantasy moon before I leave you guys, I'm going to use this 100 percent cotton paper, so it's a little bit fancier and I've already done my outline and I'm just wetting that in and then here I'm going to go through more of an AC color. I am starting out with this light blue and then moving another purply blue, and I'm dabbing away the outline that has gathered there because I don't want it to be completely dark on the outer edge. I'm just some little tiny dots and those are going to act as craters and I'm not going to let this dry. I'm just going to go straight in with my fine techs and then I'm going to dot the vodka spots right over it. This creates a really cool effect because it's a halo of the fine techs with the little dots for your craters underneath. I really like how that looks. I'm just going to keep layering these guys up because once it dries, it softens up and if you want to keep it really having a harsh edge for the craters then you have to repeat it a few times. I am just taking a brush that is mostly dry with just some paint on it and spreading out those sections like the purple dots and everything and creating craters out those so that I don't have to use like my pen to do that, and I did the same with the fine tech palette and just spread those out so that they'll be softer, which makes them look faraway or something. I really like how that looks, and I've just spread out the paint rather than adding more. At this point I'm really liking how this is going and it's mostly dry, so I'm going to go in and give myself a little bit of background here. This is really similar to what I've done in my star scapes and galaxies class. If you want to learn this more in detail, go ahead and check that thing out, but as I started to do this, I realized that my outer edge of my moon was still a little bit wet, so it bled and this a little bit, but it's not a big deal you can fix it. All you have to do is go over everything once you're done. I've added a few drops of the vodka there and I'm just waiting for that guy to dry, and dabbing away to create clouds and things. Here you can see I'm taking my pen and just going around the outer edge. Although after I've done this, looking back, I like how this effect is turned out. It's like a cloudy moon, like a Halloween moon. Instead of using the pen, this time I'm going to go in and just create my craters with a really dry brush and then adding some alcohol on top to fan it all out. Here's a nice trick, since I used the mason jar lid to create my circle, I'm going to use it again to cover up my moon and to create my star. You can see now how it stayed, nice clean lines within the moon. I'm adding just a few dots of the fine tech palettes as well. Of course, those stars have that shine. Here's the finished piece. 8. class project: So that's the end of the class, congratulations you've made it all the way through. So the class project is simple, it is to create your own moon, you can either use the reference PDF that I had put together for you or you can just create your own fantasy moons, like I've done here as well. Another note is to make sure you experiment with embellishment. There's really no limit to what you can use for these watercolor moons like have always used a tiny bit of glitter and a whole lot of fine palette, but you can try all different types of things, sharpie markers and different types of glitter and nail polishes and eye shadows and whatever else you can think of to make a nice sheen and have it be really magical and glowing like a moon should be. So I hope you enjoyed this class. If you are interested in taking any of my other classes, make sure you check out my skill share channel, and if you are interested in any class in particular, let me know and I will see if maybe I can make that happen. Thank you so much. If you want to view my website it is www.ekdoctor.com and I hope to see you in my next class.