Painting Watercolor Moonscapes for Beginners

1. Introduction: Hello, my name is Vanessa Lesiak. If this is your first time taking a class from me, I recommend that you start with dynamic galaxies my first class. The techniques you will be learning today build off of those taught in my previous class. If you enjoy what you learned today, please head over to Instagram and give me a follow at Vanessa_paints_. You can also drop me a message to say hi. You may also find me over on my website, Thesproutcreative.com, where you'll see a variety of items, including my handmade watercolors. Thank you for joining me today. Let's get started. 2. Supplies: For this class, these are the materials that we will be using. A regular pencil. It doesn't have to be any specific brand or type, just a pencil. I will be using a circle maker. They sell these just on any online store and they're really pretty cheap. If you don't have a circle maker, you can basically use anything that you can put on your paper, and trace a circle around. I'll also be providing a template at the end of the class in the project area. If you don't have a circle maker, or if you're like me and just are horrible at making circles, you can just print the template, and copy it onto your watercolor paper. Speaking off, we also have some watercolor paper. I prefer Arches paper because I work with a lot of water, and Arches paper really holds up well. It's 100 percent cotton cold pressed paper, 140 pounds. If you do not have this brand, feel free to use any other brand that you have. I really do recommend that you stick to a 100 percent cotton paper. We're going to be using three round brushes in any sizes you have. It doesn't necessarily have to be these, I have a 12, a 10 and a 2, and these are all from Princeton. If you don't have these specific ones, which you really don't need, or these specific sizes, just make sure you get a large, medium and small round brush. We are going to be using some masking tape to tape your water color paper to your surface. It could be your desk, or a piece of board, which is what I have here as well. I'm going to be taping my watercolor paper to this board, and this is just the back of an Arches pad that I removed, and I tend to use these quite a bit. We also have some white Copic ink, it's called Copic Opaque White, and we're going to be using these for the stars at the end. We have our paint palette, and you can use any colors you'd like. I'm going to be using a couple of these, and again, use the paints that you feel comfortable with. The paints that you enjoy in any color you wish. We also have two jars of water. I always prefer to have two, one for cleaning the paint off of the brush, and then one for rinsing the brush-off in-between colors, so that you don't mix your colors inadvertently. These are the materials that we'll be using for class. Let's get yours ready, lay them out in front of you, and let's begin. 3. Moonscape I: To begin, I have taken my masking tape, and taped it to the back of all four sides of my watercolor paper. After that, I'm going to take it and tape it down to the board that I am working on. You can put it down on your desk or whatever surface you have. You can also tape off all four sides to get a nice clean border. For my moonscapes I like to use every part of the paper, so I'm going to not take down the sides of the paper this time. You are also going to take your circle maker or whatever round object you have laying around and your pencil, so your circle maker and your pencil, you can also just take your roll of tape and use the circle inside of it to make your moon. I'm going to go ahead and take my circle maker. I am quite terrible at making circles. That's why I invested my $3 in this little gadget. I like to have my moons off to the side. You can also have it in the middle, you can have it anywhere you want. For this one, I like to have it on the side. You don't have to worry about how dark or light your pencil mark is going to be because we're going to cover that up. Don't worry, make it as dark as you want. I really need to be able to see the line, so I always make it fairly dark. You are going to take your biggest brush, which in my case is to size 12. You just use whichever large round brush you picked out for your moonscape. We are going to start with a base of water. You want to make sure that every part of the inside of your moon is covered in water. Try your very, very best not to get the water on the outside of your moon. Try really hard to stay in the lines. Because wherever your water goes, that's where your paint is going to go. We're going to stay as much as possible inside the lines of our moon. That's another reason why I like to have dark colors on my paper. This is probably one of the only times that you'll see a dark pencil mark on my paper. For this moonscape, I'm going to be using Daniel Smith moonglow for the inside and M grams Prussian blue for the outside. Moonglow is a pretty spectacular paints. It is slightly granulating and it separates into two colors. It's just gorgeous and I think it's quite the perfect color for moons. The first thing I do when making this moonscape, is I like to load my brush with some paints and then just drop paints into the circle on the inside. The key to this, is to try your very best not to get any paints along the edges of the moon. You want to keep that as light or white as possible. If some of it escapes into it, that's okay because by the time the color reaches it, it's going to be less saturated. I like to just put a few dots in there. We're going to clean off our brush, go back and again with just a light coating of paint. After you make your initial stops of paint wherever you want them, there is no rhyme or reason to it, you go with what you're feeling at the moment. As I said in my previous video it's all about your own creativity, I don't want you to do what I do, I want you to feel the paint, feel where you're going with this and put your own take on it. After this, we are going to just splatter a little bit of paint here and there. You need to go back and get it a bit darker, feel free to. Remember, try to stay away from the edges. I'm going to go back in and soften the edges of those splotches by cleaning off my brush, wiping it on a paper towel, and softening the edges. If you wanted to bring some paints in, you can. This is like where you experiment and you'd let your creativity come through. We're done using our big brush and we are going to switch and use the medium one, in my case as a size 10. You use whichever medium one you selected at the beginning of the class. You are going to wet your brush, dip it again in some paints and we're going to add another dot in the middle of every splotch of paint that you put down. If you wanted to add a little more, go right ahead. Let's add a little bit here and here and I'm going add a little line there. Another little technique that I like to do, is to splatter paint on here. It can be a little bit tricky because you want to keep your paint inside of the circle and not outside. If you get some outside, that's okay. What I do is I switch to my small brush, I load that up with some paint and I try very softly to get that in there. You can see I got a little bit of paint on the outside. Not a problem. We can take care of that later. Finally, you're going to take your little brush, clean it off in the water, and place a tiny, tiny dot of water on the inside of some of your circles. You can do all of them, you can do some of them, you don't have to do all of them. You're going to place a little tiny dot of clean water in the middle of some of your circles. All I'm doing is I'm rinsing my brush off and putting a dot of water. That's going to give it the effect of a crater. Then I'm going to take the same brush, go back in, load the tip of it with paint and just add a little tiny tip of that paint into the middle of that crater. You need to make it a little darker, go back in add some more, make it a little bit darker and it's going to give it that crater lake effect. Looking at my moon here, I want some of these dots to be a little softer. In order for me to do that, all you have to do is take a clean brush and using your medium brush, you are going to go back in with a nice clean dry brush, and add a little bit of water on top of them. That'll soften the look of it. I'll leave some dark, some lighter. If I wanted to add one or more here and there, I can do that at that time. Then finally, the last thing we're going to do with our moon, is to add the lines at the bottom of this create. In order to achieve that, what we're going to do is take a nice clean brush. There's no paint on it. Start at the middle and drag a line up. Very, very simple. It's going to drag some paints and make a path as well for you. You're going to do that just around. Make sure you're curving up, so you're showing the curve at the base of the moon. Start at the middle, and work your way out. You want a nice thin brush for this. You don't want to have a very heavy brush. You can make them all different sizes. You can make one going higher. You can make one a little bit shorter, or a v one. Then you're going to go back in with a fairly dry brush and add a little tiny bit of paints and edit the tiniest tiniest little dot right in the center, and our moon is done. In my previous class I showed you two different techniques that work well for galaxies. A wet on wet technique and a wet on dry technique. For the purposes of this particular moon, we are going to be working wet on dry. Not only will you have more vibrant colors, but you'll also have more control over where you lay your paint and where your paint stays. Once your moon has fully dried, you are going to take your large brush and move on to the color that you want your sky to be, and that's going to be whichever color you chose in the beginning. Again, this is completely up to you. I want you to use your creativity and go for a color that works for you. It can be blue, it can be green, it can be pink, it can be a combination of all three. I'm going to be using Prussian blue by m gram. You're going to load your brush up with as much paints and as dark as you can get it. The reason for that is, if you recall, we left the edges light or white on our moon. We are going to now do the opposite and go on the other side of your line and trace a circle around it. You want to make sure that you have the deepest, darkest saturation that you can get close to the moon. You may have to turn your paper a bit. I'm going to have to, take your time staying within the lines. So staying on the outside. When you get to the edge, I'm going to stop right there and then show you a little technique so that you don't have a very hard edges. Every so often you want to stop, you want to clean off your brush with a nice clean brush. Let the paint flow into the water so that you don't get very hard lines. If you let the paint dry too much, then you're going to have a dark line between where the paint ends and the white of the paper begins. Just let the paint flow in and keep going. We're going to load our paints. Sorry, we're going to load our brush up with paints and we are going to continue tracing a line around the edge of the moon. Again, you want this to be your darkest, and you want to stop every so often. Because remember our paper is not wet. Because of that, you want to make sure that you wet the edges so that you don't get a hard edge on the blue. Then we're going to add a little bit more so that it can blend out, and then we're going to keep going. We're going to add some water around here, and we're going back in to finish tracing the moon. Here we go. We're stopping and adding water. So you have a nice blend, clean brush, and you are going to let the edges here. Again, the reason you're doing this is so that you have a nice uniformity across your entire paper. We're going back in and tracing, and let those edges just blend out. We're stopping, going in with a clean brush and adding our water. Going back in with a nice brush loaded with paint and continuing tracing the moon. Again, if you're like me and you can't trace just try your best to stay outside the lines if you can that's okay. My moons are never perfectly circular at that point. We're done tracing that and now we want to start working wet on wet. So finish wetting the rest of your paper. It's quite all right if your brush still has the previous color. If you're going to be using just one color, if you're going to be using several colors, then you might want to make sure that you go in with just 100 percent clean water. But I'm just going to be using one color, which is the Prussian blue. I am wetting my paper fully because we're going to be working wet on wet. Now we are going to go in again with the blue, and I like to darken the edges of my sky no matter what I'm working on, I always like to have nice dark edges. That's what I'm doing here. If you need to go back in and go around the moon, then you want to go ahead and do that at this point because everything is nice and wet. If you recall, if you are one of the students that took my previous Skillshare class. One of my favorite techniques used with galaxies, and this also applies to almost any sky is the dotting technique. So I go in and I put nice dots of paints everywhere because I like to have a little bit of light and a little bit of dark. I'd like to show a lots of dimension in my piece. We're going to go in with some darks and some lights. The key to this is to make sure that the areas around your moon are the darkest. Everything else can be however you want to make it. Just makes sure that the areas around it are the very darkest area that allows your moon to pop, makes it look a little 3D. I like to turn my paper quite a bit when I am working. I'm going to go back in and make these as dark as I can get them. Then add areas of darkness and areas of lightness, because I like my pieces to be very dimensional. That's what we're going for here. Continue to do this until your piece is just the way you want it. You can switch between colors. You can add different saturation. You can make it all really really dark. You can make it lighter. The most important piece, as I said, is just to make sure that around the moon is the very darkest. The reason for that is because you want your moon to pop out. So it gives it that 3D-ish effect. We're going to leave this piece to dry while we work on our second piece. 4. Moonscape II: For our second piece, we're going to be starting at exactly the same way as we started with our first piece, with the edges taped in the back, and we're going to take that and tape it down to our board, our desk at paper, however, you're working. We're going to take that down and this time I'm going to show you, I'm just going to use the roll of masking tape to do the moon. For this one, let's put the moon in the middle, and we're going to have a nice glowing moon. We are making our circle. Remember it doesn't matter if you want a light if you want a dark however you want it. Just make the circle. We're going to start this moon the same way that we started the moon in our first painting, and that's going to be with a base of water. You're going to start off with nice, clean clear water and lay that down and in the inside of the moon, I'd soon extra extra important that you keep the water within the moon for this technique and the reason being is that, where before we tried our best to keep the paint in the middle of the moon and try to keep the edges as light as possible, for this technique, we're doing the opposite. We are working on edges first and then moving in. You're going to switch to a medium-size brush, and for me, that medium size is 10, and we are going to be using the same colors for this one that I use for the last one. Feel free to shake it up a bit and use something different if you'd like. The techniques are fairly similar. The first thing you're going to do is add some paint to your brush, and this time instead of placing dots on the paper, we're going to start and trace the inside of the circle along the edges. We're going to trace it, and you'll see here that if you lift your paintbrush up from the paper, it gives it a nice effect. That paint just disperses out. Let me add a little bit more paints and show you. We're tracing and lift and look what happens there. You want to do that every so often. It doesn't have to be, you don't necessarily have to do that for every edge that you trace, but it is a really nice effects. The most important thing here is just making sure that you go around the entire moon with a thick line or a thin line, it doesn't really matter. Just go with the flow on this one. You can have really thick places and you can have little tiny thin places here. You want to make sure that you have that edge for this type of painting. You're going to wet your brush a little and add a little bit more paint, and then we're going to do similar to what we did before. We're going to start laying down dots of paint wherever you want them. We're going to add some splotches, and we're going to soften the edges by using nice clear clean water, and we're going to dot some places. Again, you're going to use your imagination. You use your creativity. I want to go in with my small brush and I want to add a few dots of color. I'm going to do that now. A few splatter of color. It's going to add, add a whole ton right here and then I'm going to go in with a nice clean brush, and we're going to drop drops of water in it. This time, how about we drop some water in areas that don't have those circles as well? I like that. Let's do that. Let's drop some water in just random places. Drop that water in. But you also want to make sure that you drop it in the little crater that's at the bottom because that's where we're going to have our lines and again, you can drop more water in to give you a bigger effect and less water in to give you just a small separation of that paint. We are going to go back into the water, clean our brush-off, and load our paintbrush with pains. Make it as dark as you want. Not too late though. Just try to make it dark and go in and place dots in the middle of those places that you put the water in. If you made really big dots of water, you want to make fairly big dots of paint and then I think I'll add just a bit here and there. Finally, what you want to do is make your lines, if you're done, fiddling with it. If you're like me, sometimes you are not done and you want to keep going, messing around with it. Feel free to do that if that's what you want to do. I think I'm done with this one. I'm going to go back in and make the lines at the bottom and again, we're going to go one straight up. Clean your paintbrush off with nice clear water, and you want to curve it a little once you're headed towards the bottom so you're going to take it and curve your line up to show that the moon is round. You want to do that all around, and then you finally want to finish off with a dryer brush. Make sure that your brushes dry, otherwise you'll be spreading paints everywhere, and add just a little dot of paint to the inside. This moon is done. Now before we take our next step, you want to make sure that your moon is fully dry because we're going to be working very close to the edge and water, and if there's even a hint of moisture inside of your moon, then the water, the paints is going to seep out into the areas surrounding the moon. Make sure that your moon is as dry as it can possibly be. You can use a hairdryer, you can set it aside and come back to it later. One trick that you can use to tell if it's fully dry, is if you touch it and the paper is cold, that means that it's most likely still wet. Make sure it's dry and then we'll move on to the next step. Once your piece is fully dry, you are going to take your larger round brush, and with clean water, you are going to outline the outside of your moon and this is why it's important to have your moon be as dry as possible, because if you go in with a water along the outline, it's going to pull that paint into the water and your moon is going to be leaking all over the place, and you don't want that. We're going to outline the outside of the moon with water, and you want a nice bold outline. That's why we're using our big brush here. You want a nice bold thick outline, and then we are going to continue adding the water because we're going to be working wet on wet. We're going to continue adding the water to the outside and keep spreading it to the outer edges. Keep spreading that water to the outer edges of the paper. Again, starting with the inside, it'll just make it much easier to work from the inside out. I'm going to be using the same colors for purposes of consistency. Again, you don't have to. I encourage you to think outside the box, use different colors, have fun with it. I'm going to use my Prussian blue and starting on the outside, I like to make my outside as dark as possible, I'm going to add lots of color to the outside, and the key to this one is since we outlined the moon with the moon's color, you are going to leave a nice glowy shadow around the outside edge of the moon. You don't want any paint hitting that outside edge. I'm just adding my painting, and letting the paint just seep where it needs to. If it gets really close, if you have a paint that just gets sucked into the middle, that's okay because it's going to be at the very lightest around that edge. I also like to soft and the color as it's going in. I don't like to have those streaks in the paper which happens because of the way that the color is being sucked in through there and if you get a little bit of color along the edge of the moon, again, that is okay. But the most important thing is that you want it to be as light as possible. Because you want to make sure that the moon has a glowing effects and I'm going to go back in and add punches of color around it and this is where you get to have fun. Experiment with color used to in three colors. I mean, go crazy. I like to dot my coloring. I feel for me dotting the color in or tapping the color in gives a natural look. We're tapping that coloring and if you see that the paints is beginning to seep into the middle, again, you can take a nice clean brush and swipe around it to get rid of some of that paint and you don't have to get rid of a lot just enough to make sure that you still have a glowing effects. You want to go in with a fairly dry brush. You're going to clean your brush off thoroughly, dry it on a paper towel, and then swipe just around the moon and do this as many times as you need in order to prevent the paint from touching the moon. Once again, I'm going to the top and I am so wiping around it and as long as your paper is still wet, it'll blend really nicely. You won't have to worry about any harsh circular lines around your moon. Swipe it around, and swipe it around. I forgot to add some color at the bottom. Let me do that now, and that is perfect. That is it for this piece. We are going to let it fully dry, and then we will be back to add the stars. 5. Adding Stars: Now that our piece is dry, it's time to add the stars. During my previous Skillshare class, "How to make dynamic galaxies," I showed you how to add the stars with a toothbrush. This time I am going to use the same technique that I used when adding splatters of color to the moon. I'm going to use the splatter technique in order to add the stars. For this one, it doesn't really matter what size of brush you use, look, I have blue paint all over my hands. Just know that if you use a smaller brush, you get smaller splatters, if you use a larger one, you get larger ones and it just goes up from there. Also, the amount of water that you use will determine whether or not you get big water splashes. Test it out, you may want to use a little bit, you may want to use a lot. This is a more controlled method than the toothbrush method, and it's great for this type because you want to try your best to keep it off the moon. Sometimes it doesn't work, sometimes you get on the moon, that's okay. We're going to go ahead and start adding little splatters of color to your piece, and if you move your brush around, you get different patterns. I'm going to add a little bit more here, and we are done with this one, grab our glowie one. We're going to add a little bit of water to your brush, dip it into your ink, and start splattering again. For this piece, since the edges of the moon are very light or white, you want to try to keep the stars away from there and you want to try to keep your stars around the darkest part, which are your edges. Keep them as much as possible around the edge of your piece. Remember to tilt your brush every so often so that all your stars are not going in the same direction. We are done with the stars. I had this paper towel under here just to protect my desk. You don't need to have a paper towel there if you left your piece on the board, then you don't need to have that paper towel there. These are your two finished pieces. Join me in the next segment for final thoughts and your final project. 6. Final Thoughts & Project: Here are our two finished pieces. Yours may look the same as mine or may look a little bit different and the important thing that I want you to take away from here is just take the techniques that I showed you today. When painting a moon that has that 3D field, such as this one. You want to make sure to leave the inside edges of the moon as light or as white as possible. When painting a moon that has a glowing effect, you want to make sure to leave the outer edges of the moon as light or as white as possible, and make sure that you paint the edges. Here's a little close upon them, as you can see my little technique where I just tap the paint into the paper, produces some very nice effects, some light, some darks. In this one we just let the paint just run into the middle of the paper by just applying it to the outer edges, and swapping some paint away when necessary. These techniques come in very useful. With these techniques, I want you to build your final project with this base. I would love to see you do a moonscape where it's just the moon and the sky, or you can go ahead and add a little bit of creativity to which just using the techniques that I showed you today and add a little creativity to it. You can make a little mountain scene, and this is the glowing effect technique. Here is another one where I made some silhouettes of a building in front of the moon. Use these techniques and let your imagination run wild. I would love to see your projects, so when you're done with them, please post them in the gallery section and show us all what you've done. You can also follow me over on Instagram @Vanessa_paints_, feel free to post it and tag me there so that I can take a look at it and feature you in my stories. I hope you enjoyed this class. If you did, please feel free to leave me a comment, a like, a review and post to your project at the gallery page. Please feel free to also come by Instagram and say a quick hello, I would love to meet you over there.