Watercolor for Kids: Galaxies

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Colby and I'm a watercolor artist. But did you know that I didn't always think that I was an artist? When I was a kid, I thought art was super cool. But at some point I think that I thought to myself I wasn't very good at it anymore. So I stopped doing it for a long time and it wasn't until I was an adult that I started to learn how to paint and learn how to be creative in that way again, and it turns out I loved it and I wanted to make it what I did every single day. Now, because I stopped when I was a kid, one of my most important passions [NOISE] is to help kids learn how to love art and learn the techniques that they can use to paint beautiful creations that they can really be proud of. That's what classes like this are all about. Today we're all, we're practicing painting galaxies that look like this one and that look like this one. If you take this class, we're going to paint both of these galaxies using different methods that are easy to use with tools that you probably have just lying around the house. If you are ready to embark on a colorful adventure through space and time with me, then let's hang on to the next video where we're going to talk about all of the materials that you're going to need. That video is going to be especially important for parents because you can make sure that you have all of the right tools and let's get started. Can't wait to see you there. 2. Tools: Before we get started, let's talk about all of the tools, you're going to need to paint your galaxies. All of these tools are perfect for kids, and they are available at most stores, I think except for these specific paints. I ordered them off of Amazon, but we'll talk about that in a second. I know for sure you can get the watercolor paper, and the paintbrushes, and most of these stuff at Michaels, or other crafts stores, or almost all of this stuff is also available on Amazon. But really quick, I'm going to talk about these materials, and why they're important. If you want a full list of the materials, there should be a list of the materials that I'm using along with some links, to where you can purchase them in the discussion board of this class. First things first, let's talk about paper. Whenever you're painting with watercolor, it's important to use heavy paper, because otherwise, as you might have seen when you've tried with watercolor before, your paper crinkles up, it gets really warped and ruined. There's actually specific paper that's made just for watercolor, and it's a lot thicker than normal copy paper and made of different materials. This is Canson brand, and it's cold press watercolor paper, which means it has a little bit of roughness to it, and when you use it, one side is a little bit more rough, and the other side is a little more smooth. You want to use this side that's more rough. Again, this is Canson watercolor paper. This is the XL series, has this light blue cover, and I've seen these note pads around Walmart, Target, My Goals, Hobby Lobby. Basically most places you can pick up easy craft stores. Now you can use other kinds of watercolor paper or, just regular paper if you want, but especially with painting as you kids, I would pick this specific kind of watercolor paper. This is student grade watercolor paper. There are professional grade watercolor papers, but for this class I'm going to mostly be using this student grade. Next, to go along with the paper, especially when I'm painting for final projects, I always like to tape down my watercolor paper so that no matter how much water I put on the paper, it stays tucked and that lessens warping. It also creates a nice frame, as we're going to see later on in the class. When you put the tape down over the paper, you can paint all within the tape on the paper and then when you take it off, it creates a nice frame on the paper, and makes cleaning up messes a little bit easier. This is just regular painter's tape, that I like to have and will be using. Let's talk about paints next. You can use any watercolor paint that you have. You might have, Crayola or Artists Loft, or any of those other nice, cheap student grade paints and those are great. Your kids can create beautiful galaxies with that paint. My favorite student grade paint though, is called Prima marketing watercolor paint. They recently re-branded, I think they're also called Art Philosophy watercolor paints, but I picked these up off of Amazon. They are just these little pallets. I have a lot of them. Mine are all mixed together, but they are these little pallets. They come with 12 half pans, of paint and I find that the paint is just a little bit higher quality, than the big typical watercolor palettes that you have. These are on Amazon, and the two pallets that I would suggest checking out for specifically for the Galaxy class, is the Classics palette or the Odyssey pallet. You don't have to use the paint that I'm using, but this is some nice quality student grade paint, that's not nearly as expensive as the really professional stuff. It's just a step up above the $5 pallets you can pick up at Hobby Lobby. However, those would work fine too. Along with paint, the one thing that I would recommend when we paint our stars, if you want to do the splatter version, like I'm going to do, then you need a little bit higher quality of paint, mostly because you need paint that's more opaque. I'm using this Dr. Ph. Martin's Bleed-proof white paint. You could also pick up some gouache, it's spelled G, O, U, A C, H, E. Gouache is like watercolor, except it's more opaque, and so that would also work to splatter stars, or if you have white acrylic on hands, that would probably also work but if you just use white watercolor, it won't work very well because it will immediately dissolve. it will immediately disappear. The white won't be as stuck but if you don't have white paint, that's okay. If you have a white gel pen, that would work really well to draw in the stars. I just find splattering sometimes can be more fun. Along with colors, we're going to learn how to paint these galaxies, but then I also have a bonus lesson on how to use markers like watercolor. I'll be using these art lines sticks brush markers, but you can use any water-based markers. Crayola would work just fine or anything like that. I will go over that lesson in this class as well. My one note is, if you have markers that are water-based, make sure you're using markers you don't mind the nib getting a little bit worn out, a little bit freed. If you have other brush pens that you like to use for calligraphy or lettering, those would probably not be good for this class, just because it would wear them out a lot faster when you use them on this rough watercolor paper. Next, let's talk about paint brushes. Again, any paint brush you have would work great. But these are the two that I suggest for kids classes. This first set, are student grade paint brushes I picked up at Michael's. The brand is Royal & Langnickel, and technically it says they're used for acrylic, but I like to use them for watercolor. You can recognize them by the clear handle here, and this nice squishy brush. The important part is the size and the shape. The shape is round, which means that the bristles are round, and this is size ten, and then this is a size six. Again, this is Royal & Langnickel and I bought these at Michael's. These are great for students and because they're pretty cheap, you can be pretty rough with them and they should stand the test of time. If you are a student, or the kids who are taking this class are a little bit higher level and want to use just a little bit higher quality materials, these paint brushes by Utrecht, I bought them from a store called Blick Art Materials and they're also online. These paint brushes cost about the same as these do, but they are technically more professional than these ones. You can tell because professional paint brushes usually have more of a point, and can hold their shape a little bit better than student grid can. I also have a size six and a size ten with these ones, and I will be demonstrating in this class using both of them but again, you don't have to use my specific materials. These are just two I would recommend but anything you have on hand would be great. I also like to have a pencil, and an eraser just in general, but for this class, it goes along with having some bowl, or round shaped object in order to trace a circle in case you want to paint a galaxy that has a circle in shape. Finally, I always have a paper towel on hand to wipe off my brush in-between, some Q tips to mop up extra water, and I always have off to the side two cups of water, one that I like to keep clean, and one that is to stay dirty and that's especially important for galaxies. Here's a pro tip though, instead of just paper cups, I like to use mugs because they are heavier, and so they are less prone to tipping over in case there are some squirmy hands all over the table. I think that about sums up our materials. You gather yours, whatever you have on hand is going to be great, I'm sure. Just one note on the colors of the paints you pick, we're going to go over color theory within this class, but it's most important that you have a really dark color, like a dark blue, or black, or a dark purple, and then some lighter colors that blend well together, like red and blue, that make purple or yellow and green, and blue or red and orange, or colors like that that you know, will blend well together. Again, if you're not sure what colors those are, we're going to talk about that. But some traditional colors for galaxies are like blue, red, and purple, and so if you had a dark blue, and then red and purple, and maybe some black, that would create a really cool looking galaxy. Now that sums it up, gather all of your materials and I will see you in the next class. 3. Warming Up: Let's start today's painting session by warming up our hands a little bit, warming up our creative juices. Over the next couple minutes, we're just going to free paint. You can paint along with me, or you can paint whatever else you want. But either way, let's warm up those creative juices before we start to paint some galaxies. The first thing I'm going to do is take my paintbrush, I'm taking my number 10 paint brush and I'm dipping it in some water. I'm just going to choose a color in my palette over here. I want to make sure that I have lots of water on my paintbrush, so that my paint is nice and watery when I start to paint. This warm up class is really just about getting used to the materials that you have, and testing out the paint. Then in the next class we're going to talk more about specific techniques. I'm just going to start painting some basic shapes. One thing that I would pay attention to, is what happens when you paint on the water? If the paper is already wet, what happens then? What happens when you don't have tons of water on your paint brush? If I got all of this paints off of my paintbrush by painting on the paper. I didn't dip in the water before I went back to the paint. What happens to the paint when I use it then? It gets a little streaky. That's because watercolor is activated with water. Unless you have enough water than the paint doesn't go very far. That's going to be very important to think about when we start painting our galaxies. Painting different types of subjects with watercolor it's always different, but with galaxies, we definitely want to use plenty of water, along with plenty of paint to get our results. I would practice making sure that you have plenty of water on your paintbrush and plenty of water in the paint before you start painting, because we're not really looking for dry, streaky paint lines. We're looking for some nice wet painting spots that can be blended easily because that's what makes galaxies look so cool. That all the colors seem to blend together and in just a really smooth and seamless way. The way that we get that to happen is by having lots of water. We're going to talk more about that specifically in the next video. For now, just test out your colors. Maybe test out some color blends to see what colors you think blend well together. We're also going to have a class about where we talk a little bit about color theory, which means which colors go well together and how to use those colors to create really beautiful galaxies. But if you want to stay ahead of the game and test out and experiment with your own theories, then this warm up session is a great time to do it. That's what I would recommend. As you can see, as I've been talking, I've just been painting all over and testing out all the colors on my palate. That's also a really fun thing to do during warm-ups, is to test out all the colors that you have, so that you can decide what ones you like the best, and which ones you want to use when we create our final project. For now, I'm going to be done with my warm up. You can continue to warm up for as long as you want. Then when you're ready, take out a different sheet of paper, and move on to the next class where we are going to talk more about watercolor techniques. I will see you soon. 4. Painting Techniques: Welcome back girls and boys. Next, let's talk about more specifically, the painting techniques or methods that we need to use to create our watercolor galaxies. There are two most basic watercolor techniques when painting with watercolor and in the last, if you did the warm-up session, you probably used both of them. The first technique that I'm going to talk about is called the wet-on-dry technique. The wet-on-dry technique happens when you use water to activate some watercolor, which just means use water to make it, turn it into paint. Then you paint on a piece of paper that's already dry. Those two elements are what make up that technique, the dry means that the paper is dry before you start painting. What happens, do you think when you paint with your paintbrush, when the paper is already dry? You can say that out loud to yourself or you can think about it. Now I'm going to tell you what happens is that the paint stays exactly where your paintbrush goes. The paint doesn't move anywhere else, it doesn't move from the path that your paintbrush makes. It stays in the same place. Here's a little crooked Harry Potter glasses for you. The reason that happens is because watercolor is wet. It's activated with water and so that means the paint wants to go wherever it's wet. But if the paper that you're painting on is dry, then that means the only thing getting the paper wet is your paintbrush. The paint is going to stay wherever your paintbrush goes because it's always following the water. Using the wet-on-dry technique is really useful when we're trying to create really detailed paintings, when you want a lot of control with your paintings. However, when we're painting galaxies, that's not exactly what we're going for. We want to create more blends, we want to create a little bit more chaos. Make our color combinations a little crazy. That means the technique we are mostly going to be using in this class is called the wet-on-wet technique. If you followed along my warm up video last time, I mentioned practicing painting on top of paint that already exists on the paper. Practicing painting on the wet paper and if you did that, you are practicing the wet-on-wet technique. The wet-on-wet technique happens when you use your watercolor paint, which is already wet on your brush, and then paint on a surface that's already wet. Notice there are two places that are wet, the paper and your paintbrush. What happens when you use the wet-on-wet technique? Look what the paint is doing right now. That's right. What happens when you paint using the wet-on-wet technique is the paint doesn't stay in just one place. You see how it spreads out into the rest of the paper that's wet, that's what happens when you use the wet-on-wet technique. You don't necessarily have to have paint to get the paper wet, you can also do it with water. I'm just going to put some water down, some clean water, onto my paper and see what happens when I put some paint down on this spot of my paper that has water on it. You see how the paint spreads out, it wants to spread far into the water. The more wet your paper is, the more the paint will spread further out, to like the less it will hold the shape that you originally put it down in. Now, be careful of putting too much water on and I'm going to show you what happens when you put too much water on. If I put so much water that it turned into a petal, I don't know if you can see that this is a big petal, but if I looked at my paper from an angle, I could see that I'm creating this huge petal on my piece of paper and when we have big petals like this, I want you to make a petal along with me right now if you haven't already, take out your paper and your paintbrush and make a big petal like this. I'm doing that just by picking up water with my paintbrush and dropping it on the paper. Don't worry, we're going to clean it up in just a second, but I want to show you what happens when you have too much water. I have tons of water, I have this huge petal and now I'm going to pick up some paint and just drop it onto the petal and you see how the paint is definitely spreading. But instead of spreading onto the paper, it's spreading within the petal itself, on top of the water. You can tell the difference because like on this example where we used paint that was definitely spreading onto the paper, there are these like little almost like spider legs, like tree roots or something that are growing, it looks like they're growing out of the color of the paper. That's because the paint is seeping into the material of the paper, so you can see these little lines that are coming out and blending onto the paper. But we don't see any of those little lines on this patch of paint and that's because the paint is not on the paper, it's sitting on top of the petal and see even when I move the paper like this, you can see the paints swirling around on top of the water instead of staying on the paper. We don't want petals because this is not going to blend colors together very well and I'll show you. It's not going to land on the paper like we want it to, so the colors don't really blend, you see, I'm just creating layers of paint on top of the petal and that's not the look we're going for when we create galaxies. What happens then if you accidentally create a petal? That's why I like to have these Q-tips or paper towels or anything absorbent on hand so that you can just mop it up. I used so much water here, I'm going to have to use both sides of my Q-tip to mop it up. But you see when I mopping up the water, I'm also mopping up almost all of the paint that I put on top of the water. That's because the paint was living in the water, not on the paper where we want it to be. We don't want to create puddles, but we do want the paper to be wet enough so that it blends. Because sometimes if we don't get the paper wet enough or if we don't put the paint down fast enough, then it will dry before we get a chance to blend everything together. You can tell if a paper is too dry, either because the paint will stop or because it's not blending very far. You see when I put the paint down here, part of it goes very far into this portion that's pretty wet. Like this part of my paper used to be wet before and now part of it's dried because this section right here isn't blending or fuzzy at all. It's pretty crisp and clear because the paper has already dried. Now I want you to practice using the wet-on-wet technique. I want you to practice putting paint on your paper first and then putting a different color on top of that paint and seeing what happens. Then I want you to practice just putting water on your paper and seeing what happens when you put paint on the water that way. Just so you can get a sense of what it means to have too much water or too little water, I want you to try to have too much water and see what happens and then try to have too little water and see what happens. Basically just explore lots of different amounts of water that you can have and the effects that the water will have on your paint. That sums up our little tutorial on wet-on-wet painting. This is the most important method that we're going to use to create the galaxies that you want. Let's practice this and then when you're ready, we will move on to our section about color theory. See you soon. 5. Color Theory: Last thing we need to talk about before we start painting our galaxies is, Color theory. We're going to talk just a little bit about how colors blend together, and what colors blend well together, so that you can know exactly what you need to create beautiful looking galaxies. First, I want to know if any of you recognize these colors. If you do, say them out loud to your friend or your parents or whoever you're watching right with right now. If you haven't already answered this, I would love to know if you know why these three colors, red, yellow, and blue are so important. If you said that these colors are the primary colors, then you are right. I'm going to write the word primary colors. The primary colors are the basic colors that make up all of the other colors. Let me show you what I'm talking about. When you blend red and yellow together. I'm going to start with red over here. This is important. I started with red, and now I'm washing off my brush all the way, am washing off all of the red off of my brush in my water. There's no more red on the paintbrush. Before I pick up yellow, and now I'm going to see what happens when I mix red and yellow together. Now, what color is that? Let's see if we can get a better look over here. That looks like orange to me. When you mix red and yellow together, you can make orange. That's what primary colors do. When you mix two primary colors together, you can get a whole different color. The red, yellow, and blue are called primary colors, because they're the first layer of colors that you always start with. Now that we know that, let's see what happens when we mix yellow and blue together. I picked up some yellow. I'm washing all of it off in my cup of water before I pick up my blue, because I don't want any of my yellow to go into my blue palette. I'm going to see what happens when I mix yellow and blue together. Notice we can already see the blue seeping into the yellow over here. That color looks like green. When you mix yellow and blue together, you make green. Let's see what happens when we mix blue and red together. Remember, I'm always washing off my brush in-between. Whenever I pick up a brand new color, I always wash off my brush. I picked up blue and now I'm picking up red. We're going to see what happens when I mix red and blue together. That looks like purple. When you mix red and blue together, you make purple. If the primary colors, which are red, yellow, and blue is like the first layer of colors that we can make, then the second layer of colors that we've made by mixing the primary colors together, are called secondary colors. Secondary colors on the color wheel are orange, green, and purple. You can get even more color combinations. If you were to mix more of red than blue, or more of yellow than of red. Basically, all of these colors you can create every single color that you can think of on the color wheel. Now, I'm going to show you really quickly the color wheel, the most basic color wheel. I just looked up color wheel on Google and pulled this up.The most basic color wheel usually has these 12 colors, or sometimes just this pie chart of six colors. But sometimes I like to pull up the one with 12 slices in it because, when you mix even more of these primary colors together, if we have the primary colors in the first layer, secondary colors in the second layer, and tertiary colors is in the third layer. I'm not going to go too much more into tertiary colors right now, because that's pretty complicated. But just know that, if colors like red orange or yellow green, those are tertiary colors because they have more of a primary color than have another primary color. That's what tertiary colors mean. But for right now, and for this class, it's most important to know the primary colors and the secondary colors, because in order to create galaxies that blend really well together, we know we can create beautiful blends if we stick with these color blends of the primary colors. Basically your choice now is to decide if you want a galaxy that has yellow and blue to make green, or a galaxy that has yellow and red to make orange, or a galaxy that has blue and red to make purple. Pick one of those color combinations, and now Just keep practicing mixing those colors together on your paper, and we're going to practice that even more in the next videos. But using the techniques that we talked about, like the wet-on-wet technique, I want you to try specifically mixing these primary colors together, to see what combinations you like the very most, so that when we paint with our galaxies, you know exactly what color combinations you want to use. I'm just mixing these right on my paper as you can see. You can like say if I were to put a yellow, a little wash of yellow down. Let's see what happens when I pick up some red, and use the wet-on-wet technique? It blooms out, and some parts of that are turning a little bit orange, and parts of it are staying that red color. Then if I add even more yellow over here, I'm mixing it into the orange. Now, before you move on, practice blending these colors together to pick your favorite combination. You can practice that, just by putting a color straight on your paper, making sure that's pretty wet, but not too wet remember, making sure that's pretty wet, and then picking another primary color to blend with it, to blend the two together, and to see how those two react together. Pretty cool. You can practice blending these colors together a little bit more,or if you feel like you're done practicing, In the next video, we are going to start painting our galaxies. It's going to be super fun. I will see you there. 6. Prepping the Scene: Before we paint our galaxies, I'm going to do a quick demonstration of how to tape down your paper before we start. Because taping down your paper will help preserve or keep your paper safe. But it will also help create a little splash guard so that kids don't have to worry about getting paint all over the table or getting paint outside of the lines and that's always good for everybody. I'm pulling out my painter's tape and I'm going to tape the side first and making sure that I try to keep it straight as much as possible. You don't necessarily have to, but because I know that when I pull up the tape, it's going to create a frame that's the white part of this paper is going to stay white, because no paint is going to get on it. It's going to create like a frame around the painting so I want to try to keep the edges as even as possible. Now, what I'm not going to do after I've taped this first side is tape the top or the bottom. Instead, I'm going to tape the side. I like to tape down my paintings, like side to side and then top bottom because otherwise if you did it all in a row like this, the adhesive side of the tape would stick together and when we would take off the tape, it would be really tricky to take them off one piece at a time because they're all sticking together. This way, none of them, none of the tape, none of the pieces of tape we have are sticking together. They're all just on their own. It'll be easier to take it off, but we do want to tape down all of the paper. There are no corners sticking out or not taping down, just partial of the paper, we're taping down all of the edges to create a frame with this tape and to create makeshift mat of sorts. Okay. That's how you tape down and prepare the scene for our galaxy painting. Why don't you tape down your pieces of paper? Then in the next video we're going to start painting are galaxies. 7. Final Project: Layer One: Welcome to the first video that is all about creating our final project, our final galaxy. This is Step 1 or the first layer. Step 1, if you remember way back, what does it mean to use the wet on wet technique? Why don't you talk about it with your friends or your parents or whoever you're taking this class with. What is the wet on wet technique? If you've had a chance to answer or even if you didn't, that's okay, but here's the answer. The wet on wet technique is when you paint on a piece of paper that's already wet. Because watercolor, you need water to use it. That means the paint is already wet, and if the paper is wet before you start painting, that's when we're using the wet on wet technique. That's the technique that we are going to use to paint our galaxies. Step 1 after you have taped down your piece of paper, is to get your paper wet. Get it all the way wet. I'm just dipping my large paintbrush in my cup of water, and I'm making sure to get my whole surface wet. All the way wet with water, and it's okay if we use a lot of water because hopefully the tape that we're using is going to keep our papers a little bit safer from being ruined. They're always going to bend a little bit, but by putting down this tape, it's going to keep them a little bit safer. But we don't want puddles, remember. If you find that you're putting too much water on your paper, and you have little puddles on your paper, pull out a paper towel or a Q-tip and mop up some of those puddles before getting the paper really wet again. Now that we have our paper wet, you should have before this lesson, already chosen the colors that you want to use to blend together, and we talked about primary colors and secondary colors. The two primary colors I'm going to use for this galaxy are blue and yellow. Then with all of these colors I have on my palette, I have lots of different colors of blue and a few different options for yellow. I know that all of these blues and all of these yellows should go together, and I know that blue and yellow make green. I can also add in these greens and blue and yellow and green will be my color combination and they should all blend really well together. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to pick a lighter version. Whenever you paint with blends, it's huge especially with galaxies. It's usually better to go light to dark. First, I'm picking up this light blue, and I'm just like dabbing the paint onto it. I know that my paper is wet and so I'm watching as the colors are blending onto the wet paper. It's pretty cool. Now I'm going to pick up a yellow and just next to the blue, leaving a little bit of white space, I'm going to dab some of this yellow on here and watch it blend in. By dabbing, I mean sometimes I'm just like tapping the paint onto the paper and letting it blend by itself, or you can use your paint brush to brush it into the wet paper and into part of the blue. See the parts where I mixed in with the blue is already turning a little bit green. Now, this next step is a little trick that I like to use to further blend colors together. Instead of picking up more paint, I'm going to just pick up water. My paintbrush only has water on it. I washed off all the paint. I'll show you on this paper towel. It has just a little bit of green on it. I'm going to wash off a little bit more it looks like, but mostly it just has water. With the water, I'm going to get my paper even more wet, but I'm just going to tap my brush in between where I see the red and the blue are meeting. That's going to create an even more smooth blend with those colors together. With creating galaxies right, the whole point is that we want to create these really smooth blends so that the colors look like they're swirling together almost. Using water is the most important way that we can do that. As I've been talking, my paper has slowly gotten a little bit too dry. You can tell by if you peer down and look at your paper from the side. If the light is shining off of the paper, that means it's wet. But if it's not shining anymore, that means it's dry. We want to make sure that the paper always stays wet. You might have to re-wet your paper a few times, and that's okay. Our paper is wet again. There might be a little some puddles. I'm just going to mop up with my Q-tip a little bit by the edges, and now I'm going to keep going and putting different colors on here. I have a light blue and I have some yellow. Now I'm going to do a different blue. I'm saving the very darkest colors for last, remember. We're going from light to dark. With my different blue, since some places I'm just like tapping and letting the paint go by itself and in other places I'm doing these little strokes, going into the yellow a little bit. I'm going to keep doing that with these different colors. I'm going to pick up a different yellow over here, put some yellows over here. Once I've put them down, tapping them. Notice how I'm not just painting over the whole thing. I'm just using my paintbrush to almost to tap the colors into each other. I'm doing that because I don't want all of the colors mix together at once, I want to get lots of different color combinations. The way that I do that is not by mixing them with my paintbrush, but it's by gently blending them with my paintbrush just by tapping like this. This process, is how we're going to create the whole galaxy. I'm just picking up lots of different colors. Now I'm going to pick up some greens because remember, greens are going to mix pretty well with this color combination too, because blue and yellow make green. If I add green that I already have, that I should go really well. I'm going to add some green. I'm leaving some white space, and I'm going to do my water trick again, where I just have water and I'm going to blend in some of these colors together using just the water. I'm not using any paint. I'm just tapping on my paper with just the water because I do want some of the white space to stay, and I have some of the lighter places to stay. Now I'm going to do just a few more layers, a few more themes of color, some different blues. Then in just a second, I'm going to add my border. The border is going to be the darkest color that I have. For this color combination and for most of the color combinations, I would recommend either black or I'm going to be using a really dark like navy blue. I like navy blue, even more than black for almost every color combination because usually when I use just black, it can dilute the colors more than I want it to. Sometimes I like to use navy blue instead, but you can use whatever you have on hand and I'm sure it will look beautiful. I'm going to pick up more yellow and blend it in and just tapping. If you are listening to me and watching me at the same time, you notice I'm really just tapping all over, going back and forth between tapping with water and tapping with paint, so that these colors can blend really well together. Now I'm going to pick up the very darkest blue that I have. I'm going to go around. I'm going to blend this in so it's not quite a square. I'm going to do this one side at a time while it's still wet. I'm just going to right on the tape. See, that's why we like to have the tape. I'm putting down this dark navy blue and I'm going to wash off a little bit of it. Using a combination of water and this blue paint, I'm just going to blend in, like pull up on this frame so it's not quite such a line, and just keep tapping like I did before. Sometimes I don't have to stay along the edges. I can take some off of the paint, especially if it's watered down, and just push it out and make these like cloud-like things in the galaxy itself. Not too many of those, but some. The most important part is that the edges around the tape are the darkest, because that's what we're using for space. I did one side and now I'm going to do all the sides. I'm going to do the same thing that I did before, but I'm doing it one side at a time so that the paint doesn't dry before I get a chance to blend it in the way that I want to, and the way that we get the paint to blend. If you're tapping and your paint isn't blending, that means your paper is probably not wet anymore. If you find that it's not wet anymore, wash off your brush all the way completely, and then just gently re-wet it, starting from the light part and then moving and blending into the dark part. If you start from the dark part, you're just going to make the light parts darker. But if you start from the light part of the paint, then it's going to be a more smooth blend while still maintaining the light colors that you put there initially. Once you've done two sides, it's a good time to stop and pick up some puddles that may have formed, and then re-wet any of the parts of the paper that might need re-wetting. While you do that, I'm going to move on to the next video, and we can finish the next layer of this painting in the next video. Just to recap, we used this tapping method to put down all these colors together. We are not painting in broad strokes, were just tapping the color all the way around, and the paper is already wet. Practice doing that with your galaxy, and I will see you in the next video. 8. Final Project: Layer Two: Okay. While you were away, I had a chance to rewet my paper, and now I'm going to continue painting along the sides to finish the blue frame of my galaxy. So I'm painting along the sides. If you see any of the paint creeping up underneath the paper, moms and dads or adults helping or kids with good hands, you can just lightly press down on the tape just to keep it here to there. So I'm putting down my dark blue along this top edge and washing off part of it just mostly so I can have a wet brush again and use the tapping method to bring up this frame so it looks more cloudy as opposed to a line. If it looks more cloudy like the space is clouding into these bursts of color, that looks a little more realistic, a little more blendy and cool. Okay, so I'm using the tapping method to tap all these colors together, and now I just have one more frame, one more edge to finish off this frame. I'm going to use the tapping method again to mix these colors together. If you find, as you are mixing the colors and bringing up the blue frame that you're losing a lot of the colors you had before, don't worry, that step is next. So here I washed off most of my water and most of my paint so that I could use the tapping method with clean water so that I could still keep that little pocket of yellow and not have it be diluted with blue. Okay, so I have my edges. Now, my last step before I finish this galaxy is to add just a little bit more color in the places that might have been diluted with water or with paint. So right on top of this, while it's still wet, I'm going to add a little more yellow in some places just to make a little bit more vibrant. Then I'm going to add more blue in some places, more of this lighter blue in some places. Then after we've added colors in the middle, you can even add more of the dark blue around to make it even darker. Optionally, a lot of people do this in two layers, so you can wait for this layer to dry all the way before doing this again, I'm a little impatient for that so I don't usually do that but that's an option if you would like to wait for your painting to dry first and then adding a second layer of colors. Blending these guys together, it's starting to look really cool. Adding some lighter blues over here just so I can get lots of different color combinations, lots of different swirling and blending of colors. I'm making sure to be careful of puddles. If I see any puddles, I'm going to mop them up and I think that's good for puddles. Now just to wrap up this layer, I'm going to blend in a little bit more of this dark blue around the edges where I can see and using the tapping method, and want more water to blend around the edges, just like this. If there are any parts of the galaxy that looked like lines or that looked like a little more defined, not exactly like that cloud that we're looking for, then the tapping method with water is what I'm going to use to make them, to blend them a little bit more seamlessly. just like this. Okay. When you feel like you're done, you'll know when you're done. It's hard to know when you're done. Sometimes you can go for a little, it just is up to you and when you feel you're galaxy looks good enough, then stop and wait for it to dry and it might take a long time to wait for it to dry, but it has to be completely dry before we do our stars. Wait for it to dry and then we're going to come back and do our stars. If you want to cheat a little bit. I have this hot air gun which is usually used for embossing that I used to dry my paintings in between, you could also try bringing out a hair dryer and drying it with a hair dryer. It'll still take a little bit, but not as long as waiting for it to air dry, or you can take a little break and go have lunch and come back when you're painting is dry and then we're going to finish off with our stars. See you soon. 9. Final Project: Layer Three: All right, our painting is now dry and it's time to add the finishing touch, which is stars. If you have a white gel pen like this one, then I'm going to show you how I draw in the stars. Then I'm going to show you how we can use the splatter method. First with the white gel pen, I'm just going to draw little circles, just a little dot just like that. I'm going to draw them all over, all over the painting. The important part when you draw stars is to try to make them look pretty random. You don't want them to look like they're in a pattern. But it's tricky because your mind wants them to be in a pattern. Its going to to try to force you to put them into some pattern. It's helpful for me usually if I draw the stars in little clusters, like clusters of three to five and then going somewhere else and doing a cluster somewhere else. Then you would just do that for the whole painting all the way across. Now, if you have some paint, like the white paint that we talked about, then this is the splatter method. I like to use, you might want to use a smaller brush than a size six that we have, just because the splatter method can be pretty messy. But if you only have a size six and arm that's what I'm going to use to demonstrate. I'm picking up some of this white paint and it's a little bit thick. If it's too thick, it's not going to come off. But if it's not thick enough, then it's going to come off in really big splatters. We want to be careful to get the right consistency. But basically I'm going to pick up the paint with my brush. Careful not to have too much on there. I'm going to hold my brush over the top and just tap on my brush so that splatters everywhere. Don't worry this paint is washable. It will come off of clothes and surfaces. The adding the stars is one of my favorite parts. There you go. There's your Galaxy. You can also use the white gel pen or your paintbrush to add a shooting star. Like this. I just draw a line on here, the ends and the star. I can have a shooting star on there. I can look cool too. That concludes our watercolor galaxy lesson and if you want to learn how to paint something like this, if with markers, then you can move on to our bonus video. See you soon. Let's practice taking off the tape first before we move on to the bonus video. It's pretty easy. Once it's dry, you just take the tape slowly at an angle. One piece at a time. Some of the paint might have gotten into the cracks of the tape and that's okay. Just make a note of that so that you can clean it up. If you're using student grade paints, it shouldn't stain your table, unless you have like a very softwood. You should be okay. But I'm just really quickly going to wash that off of my table. Top, at an angle. It might catch your paper, so it might take off some of the paper, but that's okay too. There you go. That's how you take off the tape. Pretty simple. You have a nice frame to capture this amazing galaxy. 10. Bonus Project: Welcome to the bonus video and my watercolor galaxy class. This video is a quick tutorial on how to create a watercolor galaxy if you don't have watercolor. The answer is pretty simple, if you have water-based markers, then that should work great. Water-based markers on a paintbrush. Then you can create some pretty cool things. So I have for my water-based markers,I have these art lines sticks, watercolor markers, but you can also use Crayola markers or any water-based marker that you might have in lying around your house. The method is pretty simple, we're just going to color on this paper. This is watercolor paper that I've already taped down using the methods that I've described earlier in this class, and I am just going to scribble some of these colors that I know work well together already, based on our color theory class. I picked red, and blues, and purples. I'm going to scribble some of these colors some on top of each other's some I'm not, but making sure to leave some white space. I'm just going to scribble all over, and I'll show you the meaning behind this in just a second. So if you're doing this along with me, take your colors, and take your markers and just make some scribbles. You don't want to scribble on the whole paper, we're going to leave some white space in some places, and save your darkest color for very last. I'm going to use black as my darkest color, and I'm not going to use it quite yet. I'm just randomly, picking up some of my markers and making some scribbles. Now I'm going to take my black and scribble all the way around like this. Remember these have to be water-based to work, because we're going to use water to activate them. So I'm going to make a frame, with my black like this. Now I'm going to take my paintbrush and some clean water, and I'm just going to mix these colors together. Just like this. Sometimes, as I go from color to color, I'm going to wash off my paintbrush in between, so that I'm not just mixing. So I'm not just like creating a big mess of color, but I'm moving in circles with a very wet paintbrush, so that I can get these colors really wet and really pick up the colors because some of them might want to stay on the paper. Once you put them down, if you put too much color on and that's okay. We're going to talk about how to fix that, what the next steps are in just a little bit. But in general, going from light to dark is best. Picking up and washing off your color, in between, mixing some colors together helps to maintain the color blends, so you can see all of the different colors that we have on here. But as you can see, this is while some of the watercolor or some of the markers are still staying on there. This is working out pretty nicely and I'm getting some really cool blends with these colors that I already knew worked well together. But it's nice to see the results. I'm just going in circles and blending these together. Once you've mostly blended all this together, you might find that you can still see some of the marker tracks, where you initially put down the markers. What we need then is even darker paint, or even darker colors to go on top of them and blend them together. An easy way to do that is to draw right on this tape we have right here with whatever color that you want, and then use water, use the tape like it's a palette, and pick up the water and just fill in spots that needs to be filled in. If you have a real palette, you can use that too, or it's trickier if we tried to paint on the wet paper because it dilutes the ink a lot, and so painting on a pallet first, and then using, picking it up with your paintbrush and going around with your paintbrush is an easier way to do that. So I did that with black, and I'm going to do it with blue. In the places where I can see some streaks of the marker, I'm just going to try to cover them up as much as possible with this paint that I'm making by mixing water and the marker ink. That's how I'm going to finish off that part of my watercolor galaxy. So I'm going to do a few more of those. Using the dotting methods, the tapping method that we used in the watercolor. Other watercolor galaxy class I'm just dotting back and forth, so that I can cover up the scribbled marker texture. Although, I will say the scribbled marker texture looks cool, so you might not want to cover all of it up, just a tip from me. Then diluting this with water so that I can use it as paint. That's basically, what we're doing, is creating liquid watercolor with the ink from these markers, so that we can make more of an even texture. Then just do that until your heart's content, until you feel like, it looks like a pretty cool galaxy. I'm going to stop right there, and once it's dry, the method is the same. If you have the white paint to splatter some stars on it, then it can look cool. Or if you have a white gel pen to draw some stars on it that would look cool too. Either way, this has to be completely dry before you do that. But this is just a fun, quick, and easy way to make a watercolor galaxy, without having any watercolors. Hope you have fun. 11. Recap: Thank you so much for taking my watercolor galaxy for kids class. I hope you had a great time. I have such a great time always painting galaxies, and if you've painted along with me via watercolor then we painted a galaxy that might look a little something like this. Then here is the bonus galaxy that we painted using markers as watercolor instead of regular watercolor paint. Both of these methods are super fun and I hope that you had a great time. If you really like this class, one of the best things you can do is to leave a review of how you felt about this class, how much fun you had, and if you think that other people would enjoy it. By leaving a review, more people on skillshare can see the class and take it. If you are looking for ways to support artists and to support me as an educator, that's the best thing that you can do. But if not, that's okay. I hope you had a great time and I hope to see you next time.