Transcripts
1. Intro: Hi, my name is Kolbie and I am a self-taught
watercolor artist here today to talk to you all about
painting watercolor moons. We are going to learn about color value and we're going
to learn about contrast, and we're going to learn
how to create moons like this one and projects
like this one, using only one color and our
paintbrush and some water. I'm so excited to talk about painting watercolor
moons with you, partly because I know
that I am blown away when I get a really good look
of the moon in the sky, and especially when I
feel like I'm looking at a really cool representation
of the moon on paper. I believe that by just a few
simple tricks and practice, you can learn how to paint these really dazzling moons
that you can be proud of. If that sounds like
something that's fun for you and watercolor is your
jam like it is mine, then join me for this class and I can't wait to see
what you'll come up with.
2. Materials: Before we get started on
learning how to paint these monochrome wet-on-wet
galaxies or moonscapes, let's go over just
briefly some of the materials that you're
going to need for this class. Now, most of my materials'
videos are very similar. I use a lot of the
same stuff in a lot of my classes that I do, but if you haven't
seen any of those, this is just an overview. Also, just because I'm using professional-grade
materials, which I am, doesn't necessarily
mean that you have to use these exact
materials to get to a result that will look really amazing and stunning
and beautiful. I encourage you to use
whatever you have, but this is what I am going to be using for
this class today. Let's start on brushes. First, because we're mostly going to be doing big washes and using the
wet-on-wet technique, we don't really need
any detailer brushes, we just need bigger brushes that will let you do
bigger amounts of washes. I have a round size number 10 and a round size number 6 in two different brands and I really like both
of these brands. The first, the size
10 round wash brush is from Princeton, which is a very
well-known name and watercolor brushes and this
is the Velvet Touch series. It's synthetic sable hair
and it's soft-bristled, but it's a little
bit more firm than other series that
Princeton releases. I really like the
Velvet Touch series and that's the number
10 that I'm using. Then the number 6, which is still a bigger brush but just a little bit
smaller than the 10, I am using another synthetic sable
hairbrush by Utrecht brand. You can recognize
this synthetic sable hairline by the black handle. It's series 228 and this, I would probably compare most to Princeton's Heritage Series, which is the brand
of brushes that has maybe the
brighter red handle. But these are a little
more economical. I bought them on Blick
and they're some of my favorites to
use when teaching. I use them in all of my
workshops because they are more budget-friendly but still have some of
the great qualities. Size 6 and size 10 are the brushes I am going
to be using today. Next, let's talk about paint. For this class, I would
recommend you pick a paint color because we're focusing on monochrome washes, remember, to paint a moon, we're just going to
be using one color. I would recommend
picking a color that at its darkest
value is very dark. For me, my colors of
choice today while we practice are Daniel Smith
Extra Fine Watercolors. Both of these brands
are professional-grade. Daniel Smith and Payne's gray, which is a dark navy, but the Daniel Smith brand has a little more gray tones to it than Winsor and Newton does. Then, Winsor and Newton, I'm using perylene violet. Both of these can get really dark when we use
very dense pigment, which is perfect,
exactly what we want when we are trying
to create contrast. That's my long
disclaimer with paint. Along with paint, I always
like to have a palette. Any plastic palette will work. This is a porcelain
palette that I have a stack of these little
round porcelain palettes that I like to use. When we are painting
our moonscapes today, color value is going
to be important and a palette will be
important for that reason. I would have one on hand. Regarding paint
also, sometimes I like to use some handmade
watercolor paint. I don't talk about that much here in any of these classes, but I thought that today I would paint using one of my favorite handmade
brands of watercolor. They're called wild
thorn watercolors and I'm going to be
using their indigo, which is a very highly
pigmented indigo. Those three colors I'm
going to be using. Next paper. I always use student-grade
paper when I practice and then I use
professional-grade paper when I do my final piece. When we do our final project, I'll be using this
professional watercolor paper. It's a Blick Premier
Watercolor Block, 140 pound, I would
recommend you have at least 140 pound paper always. The biggest difference between student-grade
watercolor paper and professional-grade is what
the two papers are made of. Professional-grade is made
of 100 percent cotton, which makes it very absorbent
and great for watercolor, it warps a little bit less
than student-grade paper, and it helps the colors
remain really vibrant. Student-grade is
made from wood pulp, which is less expensive to make and makes it a lot cheaper
for you to purchase, which is why I always use
student-grade when I practice. But as you can see on here, today for this class, I'm
using the brand Fabriano, there is line of
student-grade paper and it's made of
25 percent cotton as opposed to 100
percent cotton. That's the biggest
difference there. Regardless though, I always use cold press watercolor
paper when I do illustration work and I always
have at least 140 pound. That's paper. Then just to wrap up, I love to have Q-tips on hand. We're going to be
using a lot of water, so it's going to be necessary to mop up some of
that water sometimes. Then to have a pencil and
eraser is always really handy, especially when we're creating moonscapes where we want
to create perfect circles. I don't know about you,
but I am not always great at creating [LAUGHTER]
perfect circles by myself, so I always have some guide. Then as always, when
I do watercolor, I have a paper towel on the side and I have
two cups of water. One that I always
like to keep clean and it's especially
important as we are playing around
with color values and contrast in this class to
have at least one thing of clean water so that you can not dilute the paint when you're trying to have the
white come through, which we'll talk about
later on in the class. Let's have you gather all of your materials and move
on to the next video.
3. Wet-on-wet technique: Before we start learning how
to paint these moonscapes, I just want to go over a few different topics in the next few videos
that will be really important to master and to keep in mind as
we begin painting. One of the most important topics that we're going to [LAUGHTER]
talk about, honestly, in any watercolor class, is the difference between
wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry. You probably know this if you've taken any
of my other classes, but just in case, here's a brief overview. The wet-on-dry
technique is when you paint on a piece of paper with watercolor
that's already dry. The idea is the paper is dry, that's the dry part,
and the paint is wet. It's always wet because watercolor is activated
through water. With the wet-on-dry technique, you get really crisp lines, and the most important
part is that the paint goes where
your brush goes. It doesn't go anywhere else because there's nowhere
else for it to go. Watercolor paint is going to move wherever there's water, and so if your brush is the only thing that
has the water, that's the only path that your watercolor
is going to take. Wet-on-dry is important
for detail work, it's important for getting
really crisp lines, and it is a technique that
probably if you're a beginner, you have mostly painted doing
the wet-on-dry technique. That said, we're not
going to be using much of the [LAUGHTER]
wet-on-dry technique today. We are mostly going to be using
the wet-on-wet technique. As you might be
able to summarize, the wet-on-dry technique is when the paper is dry
before you start painting. The wet-on-wet
technique means that the paper is wet before
you start painting. [NOISE] What's most important, and I think what's most magical, [LAUGHTER] about the
wet-on-wet technique is that when using the
wet-on-wet technique, it will go basically
wherever there is water, and it will bloom out by itself. You see how when I started painting with this
already-wet surface, I just put a wash
of water on here, the paint doesn't just go
where my brush tells it to go, where my brush drops it, it wants to move wherever
there's wetness. [NOISE] This might be very
rudimentary and basic, but when it comes to
moonscapes and, honestly, galaxy techniques in general, what we're looking for
is a swirl of color. We're looking for a swirl of pigment of different
contrasting things, and we're looking for some
pretty smooth blends, and so that means we don't want paint where we can
see the paint lines. We want our paint to blend
in with its surroundings. As you can see, I'm adding more water to
this pigment right here. We're going to talk more about this when we actually get into the moonscape tutorial, but really, painting moons with watercolor is just
a big practice in using the
wet-on-wet technique. One very important thing
to remember when using the wet-on-wet technique is to focus on how much
water you are using, both on your brush
and on the paper. Let's see if I can show you what happens when you don't
have enough water. If you have just a
little bit of water so that the paper
is just barely wet, the paint, ultimately, isn't really going
to go anywhere. It's dry, and there might be a little bit of
fuzziness, like right here. The paint is slightly fuzzy, but it's not really
moving anywhere. We're not really
getting lots of blends. It's useful to know that
if ever you want to create just a thin, blurry line or
something as opposed to a lot of seamless blends. If I just wanted to
paint this thin, blurry line like that, then knowing that, I would want just a
little bit of water, but [NOISE] in order to create more swirling
blends like this, you want to have a little
bit more water on the paper. However, there is
such a thing as having too much
water on the paper, and I'm going to show you
what that looks like. I'm just piling
the water on here. When you have too much
water on the paper, you can tell even before you start painting
because if it looks like a puddle or if you
can see the ridge of where the water is
coming up off of the paper, that means you have too much. When you put paint on
top of too much water, it doesn't go anywhere. It just sits on top of
the water as opposed to moving elsewhere on the
paper like it does over here. To even further
demonstrate that, if I were to take
my Q-tip and mop up this puddle of water right here, most of the pigment is gone. Most of the pigment has
been mopped up along with the water because it never really touched the paper
in the first place, only a little bit of it did. That's one of the big
reasons why I always have Q-tips on hand whenever I
do big washes like this. It's important to master the sweet spot between too much water and
too little water to get your perfectly, I hate saying perfectly, so I'm not going
to say that again, but to get a very swirly, blendy moonscape that
you're looking for. One more thing to note, it's possible to put too
much water on your paper. It's also possible to have
too much water on your brush. Those are two of the
main culprits where water makes its way [LAUGHTER] into your piece where maybe you
didn't want it to, where you start to get puddles. If you notice that you're
being really careful about how much water
is on your paper, but you still have
tons on your brush, but it's still puddling, then it might be because you've loaded your brush and your
paint with too much water, and I'll show you
what that looks like. I really loaded my
paint up with water, and it's still moving around, and it's fine, but I'm using tons of
water on my paintbrush, and that might not
be what I want. With that, we're going to talk more about that
when we move on to our color value video
in just a minute. For now, practice the
wet-on-wet technique, practice water control. Remember that if you
have too much water, you'll probably be
able to see it. It'll probably puddle
on your paper, and the paint will just
sit on top of the puddle. That's not what we want, but we don't want too
little water either. We want that nice
sweet spot where if you look down on your
paper at an angle, you would see that it's shining which indicates that
the paper is wet, but not that it's a big puddle. But it's okay if there
is a puddle because as long as you have a Q-tip or a paper towel or something else, you can easily mop it up
and all will be fine. That sums up my thoughts on the wet-on-wet technique
for this class. Now let's go ahead and
move on to color values.
4. Color values: Welcome to our overview
of color value. Color value is a really important
aspect of color theory, especially when it
pertains to creating monochrome moonscapes
like we're doing today. Color value, essentially, if you don't know the
definition already, is a color's lightness
or darkness. The biggest difference between the value of a color and say, creating a shade or a tint or a tone of a color
is that changing the value of a color does not change its
chemical makeup, which means the lightness
or darkness of a color, if you're talking about values, the pigment maintains
its chemical makeup. It's in its purest
pigment as opposed to when you add black to a
color to make it darker, or if you add white to a
color to make it darker, or gray to a color to change it. That changes the structure, the chemical makeup of the actual pigment
that you're using, and so those have
different tones, those have different
terms that we use. The value of color again is its lightness or darkness
in its purest form. The way that we get or change color value in watercolor
is by adding water. As you can see here, I have
some examples prepared. These are the three colors
that I mentioned at the beginning that I'm
mainly going to be using, Winsor and Newton
perylene violet, Daniel Smith Payne's gray, and this is wild thorn indigo. As you can see on this
side of the gradient, I have the pigment
in its darkest form, and then over here I
have it really light. I'm going to show you right now exactly how I got that gradient. The definition of a gradient
is going from one color to the next fairly smoothly. The way that I've created
this gradient here, and you can practice
along with me is I'm picking the
color that I want, so first I'm going to
do perylene violet. In order to get the very
darkest color value, I want my water to pigment
ratio to be mostly pigment. So my brush is a little bit wet, but I'm picking
up on the part of my paint that it's
not already wet. There are no puddles
or anything on here. It's mostly just a
big glob of pigment. I'm picking up mostly pigment. Once I put it on the paper, it's not going to be
very wet or liquidy. It's going to maybe be
a little more viscous, that's one way that you
can tell your watercolor is the darkest that
it can be in value. I'm putting the darkest
that it can be, then I'm washing off my paint from my paintbrush all the way. Starting a little
bit to the side, I'm going to put down some
water and I'm going to come up and meet my glob of
watercolor over here. Then I'm just going
to blend it in and watch as the part where
the water met the paint. Now I'm getting this
light purply pink color. I got that color by adding tons of water to the end
of this pigment over here. The pigment is moving into
the water because it's wet, so it wants to go there
like watercolor does. In the process, it's leaving some pigment behind and
moving some forward, and so it's creating
this nice gradient. I love creating gradients
because it is a good way to test how much
contrast your colors, the paints that you're
planning to use will have, and that's especially
important when you are creating moonscapes. Again, the way that
you create value or change value in watercolor is by adding water or by
not adding water, picking up paint that doesn't
have nearly as much water. In our moonscape class, mostly we are going to be creating those
different color values on our actual painting as
opposed to using a palette, that said, sometimes the
first layer of the moon, I like to already have
a light color value. The way that you get
that light color value before you actually start painting is by putting whatever color
you're going to use, I'm going to pick up some
Daniel Smith's Payne's gray and put it on this
palette right here. Then I pick up the
paint and I put it on the palette and
now I'm picking up some water and dropping
it in this pile of paint. That's going to make the
paint really liquidy, really watery, and
also very light. As you can see, this is when I'm painting with this lighter color value
that I've mixed on my palate versus this is what Payne's gray looks like when I have a
little bit more pigment to it. Night and day difference. That contrast is
going to be very important to us as we
paint our moonscape. I'm just going to do the
same thing as I did up here with this
wild thorn indigo. Remember wild thorn is some of my handmade paint from my
friend Kim in California. I'm going to do the same
thing where I'm going to start with some wetness and then meet it so that
it can blend on its own. Now, this indigo
has a lot of range. It goes really far and has a lot of contrast
to it so that's partly why I brought it up in this class because it's
one of my favorites to use for moonscapes particularly. That is the basics of what you need to know regarding color value for moonscapes. Now, after watching this or during watching this, practice creating gradients, practice picking
up the most amount of pigment to get a
very dark color value, also practice creating lighter color values
using a palette. I just think creating these
gradients is fun in general, it's a fun way to warm up, that's something that I would recommend you do before
moving on to the next video. But regardless, this is information you're
going to need to know, it's going to be very
important. Let's move on.
5. Creating contrast: Before moving on
to our tutorial, I want to do a quick
note on creating contrast while using the
wet-on-wet technique, because that's really all we're going to be doing with the moon. Just because this is
something I know that especially if you are a beginner if you're haven't
done this before, a lot of my beginner students struggle a little bit with this. I just want to talk a little bit about what contrast and
why it's important. Basically contrast is how you get moons to look like moons. Is how creating those shadows and the difference
between light and dark is the biggest
indicator that you are creating a moon
instead of some galaxies. Here's just a quick example of a moon that I recently painted. I used this wild thorn
indigo to create this moon, and I have some spots
that are very dark, and I have other
spots that are white, where you can still see
the white of the paper. I honestly probably
would've been more happy if I had a little bit
more white spots in this finished product. But the biggest aspect or probably the trickiest
part of painting moonscape, is maintaining that contrast, adding dark while still
maintaining the white parts. In order for this to
be true monochrome, we aren't going to add white, we're [LAUGHTER]
going to only use water and whatever
color we're using. This quick review video just has some of my biggest tips
on how to achieve that. Number 1 is instead of
starting with dark right away, to start with light. That is why we have our mixing palettes over
here so that we can create a lighter value version of whatever color we want
to paint with first. As a general rule of thumb, it is way easier to make something darker than it is to make
something lighter, way easier to add a little bit darker
pigment than to take away dark pigment in order to try to have the
white come through. With that in mind, it just
makes sense to start off with some lighter pigment and
have that go a long way. That brings me to
my second point, which is your pigment,
your watercolor, especially if you chose a color that has a very high
contrast value, like a Payne's gray or an indigo or a perylene violet
like the one I'm using. Your pigment is going
to go a long way, so you don't need to
use a whole lot of it. It's more important that
we maintain the whitespace and then we can blend in
whatever pigment we have after. [NOISE] To review, we have talked about
how you start with light and then you move to dark in order to make
something darker. I've started blending
in a little bit of that pigment and
now I just added in a little bit more pigment onto this lighter value
one on my palette, just added a little
bit more paint to make it a little darker. Then I can add dark places on top of the
already white ones. But remember that because your pigment is going
to go a long way, that means when you're
adding dark on top, even more dark on top of things, you don't need to add nearly
as much as you think. That's my thought
about the paint. Now, my thought about
the technique is the biggest mistake I see people make is when they're trying
to blend in their paint, they will move the pigment along like this and just
paint it all over. That doesn't maintain
the white underneath, that just moved your pigments, so now you have a big wash
of blue. That's okay. Honestly, as long as it's still light enough that
you can add pigment on top of it then it's
going to look fine. We'll talk about that as we
do our actual moon tutorial. But I do want to say that if you want to try to maintain the
white as much as possible, instead of painting like this with your brush when
you're trying to blend in, first of all, I frequently wash off my brush so that
I'm washing off the pigment and only using water mostly when I'm
blending things in. Then instead of brushing
and stroking like that, using my wet brush, I dot, I tap along the edge of
where I wanted to blend in. This is one of the
techniques that I like to use because it helps me maintain the spots that
I want to keep white, as opposed to making
it more difficult and just moving the pigment all over the place like that
stroke would do. [NOISE] Those are my
notes on contrast and how to maintain the contrast that you need in order to
make it look like a moon. A lot of these shadows
and swirls exist. Practice that again, we don't want to
have our strokes be like wide strokes
using the full brush. When I'm blending things in I'm only having water on my brush, and I mostly like
tapping that water around in order to blend the
paint in with the white. Always put light first
and then dark on top. As you're adding
dark pigment on top, you will need to
add less and less because the dark pigment
is going to go a long way. That's the recap of this
short video on contrast. I would definitely
recommend you practicing, creating contrast
using the wet-on-wet technique on some
practice paper, before we move on to
the next tutorial. But the next tutorial is
not the final project, it's just a how-to
paint the moon. We're going to recap most of what we've
already talked about. I'm going to talk a lot about the techniques that
I'm using while I teach you how to paint a moon and exactly
what I do to do that. Practice contrast,
practice color values, practice the
wet-on-wet technique, and then when you feel
you have those down enough to move on to
the next tutorial, I will see you there.
6. Using white paint: Before we move on, I wanted to touch really quickly on what happens when
you add white paint. Instead of trying to maintain contrast by
leaving white spaces, what if you just added
some white paint? Because I get that question a lot and my answer is, well, I really prefer to use the white paper
underneath and just do different values of a pigment just because
I think the color is a little pure and I'm
going to show you why. But you can still get some pretty cool results
if you do use white paint. Here's my crudely drawn
circle and I'm going to add some indigo paint here just in a few
different places. As I'm blending, we're going
to learn how to do this even at a greater extent when we move on to the moon tutorials. Let's say I add just a little more pigment
than maybe I intended, or it's just going everywhere and I'm planning
to add white paint instead of trying to keep the white
space underneath intact. Again, I just want this to
be a quick note on this, so I'm rushing, but I have some white
paint over here. This is white gouache. I'm going to pick up
the white gouache. If ever you use white paint
to create more white space, it should be gouache or another opaque [NOISE] but
activated by water paint. It works. See, if I add this white paint here, it definitely does add create white space
where it wasn't before, but it also dilutes
the color around it. Instead of being a
different value of indigo, it makes it a tint. In color theory, when you
add white to a color, it changes its lightness by
making it more pastel-like. I think chalky is a good adjective to describe
how the color looks. Instead of looking vibrant
and more transparent, it looks a little more milky. As I'm blending this white in, I'm getting more of
a slate blue indigo as opposed to just
a light indigo. I'm going to show you what
that looks like on the palette too just to demonstrate. Actually, I'll do this first. Here's what this indigo looks
like just by adding water. If I add water to this indigo, it's still like this
transparent-looking paint. [NOISE] But when I add
white to that indigo, it definitely makes it lighter, but it's also a little more chalky and it's a
little more diluted. It's not quite as transparent as it is before and that's because you've
changed chemically the structure of the pigment. It's not the same indigo anymore and you've made
a tint of that color. One reason for moons especially, I don't usually use white, is because I don't
really like to have that chalky texture in my moons, but if you dig that, if you really like it,
then you should go for it. There are lots of other planets and galaxy paintings
that you can do where I would recommend including white and
creating some tint. If you're trying to create
a cloud-like blend, then that's a really
good way to do it. But for these moons, I'm just doing
straight monochrome, straight color value, no white added separately,
only using water. That is my method, but you figure out what
works best for you. I just wanted to show you what this would look like
if you did add white. Without further ado,
let's move onward.
7. Tutorial: Full Moon: Let's get down to the nitty-gritty of what
you're really here for, which is learning
how to paint a moon. First, our first tutorial is going to be the
easier of the two, and that will be
painting a full moon. Basically, we're just painting a circle and are
painting a bunch of contrasting colors
in the circle, not one color, we're painting a bunch of contrast of one color
within the circle. It sounds simple enough, but sometimes it can be tricky, so hopefully watching
me do it and keeping in mind all of the
techniques we've talked about before
will be helpful. As I mentioned before, I'm not always great at
creating perfect circles. Luckily, I have some circle guides of
things that I use on hand. This is my porcelain palette that I was using before
that is also a circle. I'm just going to use it
as a guide, and then, in pencil, create the circle. One of the most frequent
questions I get asked is, how do you always keep your galaxies or your
moons inside the circle? The answer is, I'm very careful. It doesn't always stay
exactly within the lines, but with a lot of practice and by being careful with
your paintbrush, you mostly can get there. There's not any real
big trick to it, I just am I'm careful. Number 1, if you're
going to trace a circle, I would do that in pencil. You could, if you wanted, after you have traced the pencil just because we know that in order for it to
look like a moon, we want it to be a
little contrasted, so some of these things
need to be white. You can take a kneaded eraser. A Kneaded eraser is
basically an eraser that's putty like this,
kneaded like K-N-E-A-D. This is Faber-Castell I believe, the brand of this
kneaded eraser. You can take the kneaded
eraser and pick up some of the pencil so that the
pencil line is really faint. I like to do this when I'm drawing in pencil first because pencil is really hard to erase once there's watercolor
already on top of it. If you only have a little layer, then sometimes it comes off, but other times it doesn't, it just stays on the paper forever. Using a kneaded eraser to
pick up the bulk of the lead, leaving you just
this faint outline of a circle can be a good way to maintain your shape without also having
the pencil lines that you maybe don't want. Now that I've done that, knowing this is the wet-on-wet
technique and knowing that I want to have a
lot of whitespaces left, I'm going to wet my circle. It doesn't matter
what brush you use. I was using a six, but
I'm using a 10 now. You want to get your
circle wet with water not paint because we want to maintain as much
white underneath as we can. I'm using student grade paper because this is a tutorial, remember, this isn't
my final project. But one thing
that's tricky about student grade paper is, often it dries faster than professional
grade paper does, so if you need to
go a little bit at a time with the
moon, that's okay. I am going to attempt to
do it all at once though. I'm moving as fast as I can, but you might be a little
bit slower, and that's okay. You'll get faster the
more you practice this. But as you're putting more and more water
down on your paper, you might notice that your
paper's warping a little bit, and that's normal,
paper always warps. If you're worried about that, then one trick that I have, if you don't have a block of paper where they're
all glued together, is to tape your paper down with painter's
tape on all four sides. That keeps it taut and will lessen the warping a little bit. Now I have my wet moon, and without wasting
too much time, I still have some Payne's Gray left over
from my video on contrast, I'm going to add more
water to this and add just a few little dots and swirls of this lighter
value Payne's gray. On my wet paper already, I'm just adding
some Payne's gray, leaving some white spots. I don't really have a plan. I don't have a rhyme or reason
to where I'm painting it. I find that I am more
loose and can get better watercolor results when I just go with the
flow and eyeball it. But that's up to you. I put down some really watery, really light color
value Payne's gray, and now, like I talked about
in the contrast video, I'm washing off my brush. Even though this pigment
color was very light, it's still too dark for me to
blend it in with the white. I'm washing off my brush, and I am just putting down
water in places where I want this pigment to
blend in a little bit more with the white underneath. I'm only moving
along the pigment because I want some of these whitespaces
to be maintained. Not all of them are going to
still be there by the end, but for the most part, I want to have enough whitespaces so it
still looks like a moon. Did you notice I mopped up a little bit of a
puddle right here? I'm going to be doing
that periodically. Honestly, this process of
putting down the pigment, and then blending it in, and then mopping up what
needs to be mopped up, and then blending in
a little bit more is basically how I'm going
to do the whole thing, but I'm going to get
darker and darker as I go. I put down that first layer, and now I'm going to add
a little more pigment to my palette over here so I can get a little
bit darker of a color. Not the darkest yet, but just a little bit darker. In some of the same spots that I already placed
pigment and maybe some not, I'm going to put down just a little bit more, not too much. If you put down
too much pigment, it's going to be way too hard to maintain the white spots. That's probably the
biggest piece of advice that I'm going to
repeat over and over again. You can tell that it
needs to be blended. If you can see the spidery
legs, you see how, when I put down the watercolor
sometimes in the paint, it doesn't blend super smoothly, you can still see some of
the path of the watercolor. That's not exactly the effect that I'm going for with a moon, I want it to be a little
bit more blended, and so that's why I'm
going in with clean water. I just wash off my brush again, and I'm just tapping
around here in order to blend in this color with its surroundings to make it look just a little more natural, a little more like moon. The trick is, the more
water that I add, the lighter that it gets. You see when I first put down that pigment, it was darker. But because I'm
adding more water, I'm making it a lighter
value in color. That was that layer. Now, I'm going to add even more pigment to
my palette over here. Pretty soon once I have enough pigment
down where I only want a few more dark spots I'm going to go straight to the source
instead of using my palette. But for now, I'm mostly putting the dark
spots in the same spot that they were before to build off of each
other and again, to maintain the white spots
that I've already designated. It's okay if some of the white spots
disappear by the end. But for the most part, I'm trying to keep enough of the white spots so that
there's that contrast because that deep contrast between the dark spots and the white
spots is what's going to make these moons evoke emotion
and look really beautiful. Another note about these
moons that we're painting these aren't supposed to
be like super realistic, although they look
pretty **** close. Just from the nature I
think how our moon looks, painting with watercolor this way you can get pretty close. But I'm not specifically
painting any craters. Usually in a moon you can see there's a big crater right here that
spirals out like that, almost like the desk
star in Star Wars, but I'm not going to
paint that right now. Just for the record, I'm doing more of like a
loose watercolor moon. Not worried too much about all of the very specific details. My white space is gone, that's okay I still
have some left. Now I'm going to
add even more dark, I say even more, but I meant even darker paint, not even more on the thing. The darker I get, honestly, the less
paint I'm adding. But that one is pretty dark. I wash off my paintbrush so
that I can blend this in. Every time I touch
really dark pigment, I'm going to have to wash
off my paintbrush again. Because every time my paintbrush touches the dark pigment, it picks up the dark pigment so it's going to move it around. What I really don't want is
for my painting to look like, I have like globs of dark spots. I don't want that necessarily. I want it to look
a little natural and the way that I achieve that, I go until I feel like I've
hit a good stopping point. I will say it is very easy to
take your painting too far to paint a little bit more than maybe you intended and have it be not quite the end
result you were hoping for. I'm going to add some dark
spots just around the edges here because I like that. Notice how I've gone a
little bit outside of my circle and that's okay. But if I paint very
carefully along the edges, I can make it just a little bit of a
dark spot along here. Now I want to be careful because I have a
lot of dark spots, not very many white ones,
light ones underneath. I'm mopping up some
places where I need to and I'm going straight
to my pigment now, not even on the pallet anymore. In some of these
really dark spots, just going to add a
little bit more of this dark pigment so
that they can maintain those dark spots of contrast. I'm saying this over
and over again, just because it's so important. Those areas of contrast are really what
bring moons to life. That's what we're
trying to achieve, what we're trying
to accomplish here. But I could be
getting dangerously close to doing too much. I'm almost done with this moon, but essentially this
is how you paint. This is how I paint moons, I just go back and forth
and back and forth with different values I blend it in. I blend in the
colors with water, just like dotting
around like this, maintaining the
white spaces so that I can more easily maintain the contrast
that I'm hoping for. I might just do one more round of adding some darkness and
then I think we'll be done. But again, I don't want it to look like I
just have globs, like circles of dark. I want it to look a
little more natural so I'm extending
some of the pigment. That's what I'm doing for
some of these things. It's not like an exact circle. Then the more I blend it, the more I can achieve that kind of look
that I'm going for. Last time blending, so much water in order to get these moons to be right I always have
to use so much water. That's why it's important
to use heavy paper. That's at least a 140
pound watercolor paper. Because anything else, and it would not hold
up nearly as well. Even watercolor
paper is going to bend and warp a little bit here like it is doing right now. That's important to
know, but there you go, I'm going to stop there. I'm going to call that
good for my full moon. I think I may have done
a little bit more. I probably wanted to leave a little bit
more white space, one trick you can do for that is use water as a
pigment push away. If I put water down over here, sometimes while it's still wet, we'll push the pigment back
away from where you are. That can be a useful trick. If I'm using clean water, I just want to make a little
bit more of a contrast here. That can be helpful. I made a little bit more white
space, so that's good. But for the most part I'm
pretty happy with that. That's the full moon tutorial. Now let's move on to the
crescent moon tutorial.
8. Tutorial: Crescent Moon: Welcome to our crescent
moon tutorial. We've painted our full moon, here's the full moon
for that tutorial, and now we're going to learn
how to do the same thing, but with a crescent moon. It's, the painting honestly
is the same technique, but we're going to practice
in a different shape. First step like before, is we're going to draw a
circle with our pencil, and you might be saying
to yourself, but Colby, I thought we were making
a crescent shape. We are, this is how you
make a crescent shape when the moon is in
a crescent shape, it's not like part of the moon has just
vanished into thin air, it's just that you can't see it. Within our circle
that we've drawn, we're just going to make the basic shape of a crescent
by doing this curvy line on the inside so
that now we have this crescent shape that is
mostly a perfect circle. I'm going to like I did before, take my kneaded eraser, and I still want to see the crescent shape here in pencil so that I can
maintain those guidelines, and the circle, but I
wanted to get rid of them, so they're pretty faint, so they don't show up
when I start painting. The trick with the
crescent moon, and to make it look blended, so it's not quite so stark as if I just painted a crescent, and then painted the moon
inside the crescent. I like to do it this way so
that I can blend this part of the moon with the outer
part of the moon if that makes sense like the
paint is going to stay on this part
of the crescent, but then I'm going to use some wet-on-wet techniques
in order to make it a little bit less stark of a line because that's not
exactly how the moon looks. First, though we're
going to paint this moon starting
the same way we did the other one with wet, and we're staying inside the Crescent as
much as possible. I'm just putting
down this layer of water staying inside the
crescent as much as possible, and we want to make sure
that this part doesn't dry. We want it to stay wet, especially along
the crescent ridge because it's going to
need to stay wet if we're going to blend it
in realistically with the part of the
moon that we can't see, and I'm going to
show you what I mean in the course of this tutorial. We have this wet crescent moon, and instead of paint gray, I'm going to do some
perylene violet for this wet crescent moon. I had just a little bit of paint over here to my palette, and I'm going to add
just a little bit of water to make it pretty white, and similar to before
just adding some color, and I'm going to
start blending and doing that process
that I did before. Blending around the color, but leaving some white space, and blending so that I'm
getting rid of a lot of the spider leg tendrils, we want it to blend
pretty smoothly, and with the water. Now I'm going to add a little bit more
pigment over here, not as much as I did before because it
doesn't need as much. Especially with a crescent moon, you don't need nearly as
in as many places as I did with the full moon
in the last tutorial. Just like a good
rule of thumb is, don't put as much paint as you think
[LAUGHTER] you need to because on all likelihood
you probably don't need to. But as I have mentioned before, if you do accidentally make your whole moon be
like one light color, that's okay because if you just add a darker contrasting
color on top of it, as long as you have some dark
spots to add that contrast, it's going to look fine, it's going to look okay. That's why we go from light to dark because if
you make it too dark, at some point, you do
have to call it and say, well, I just don't know
if this is salvageable. But hopefully, if you're
going layer by layer, and not getting too
dark along the way, you'll never reach a point
where you think to yourself, well, this is just
not salvageable. But if you do, it's just
paper man [LAUGHTER], and probably looks okay, and it's important to know
that I've painted many, many of these moons. As you're painting,
make sure to look for places where you might want to add a little more contrast, so I like to always have at least some part of an
edge that's dark over here, and I don't want too much. Now I'm washing off my brush, so I have water so
that I can blend in this paint really
nicely with the water, with the moon
that's already wet. The wet-on-wet
technique is so fun, and it's tricky, but
it's really fun, and it comes up watercolor. Honestly, the
wet-on-wet technique is why I love watercolors
so much because it just creates this wild chaos. If you let watercolor
do its thing, you're going to create
something pretty beautiful, you just have to learn how
to control it a little bit. I'm just about done, just going to add in
a little bit more of these contrasting darkness, dark spots over here, and then after I have
created these dark spots, I'm going to take my brush, I'm going to call
that good for now. You can keep going if you want, but I'm going to call that good. Remember how we talked
about blending in. Well, I want to make sure that along the edge there is
still some color over here, so I want to make sure
that this edge has color along the Crescent
because we still want to maintain
the basic shape, but starting not where the color is starting
elsewhere in the moon, it doesn't even necessarily have to be in this
perfect circle over here but starting not
where the painted moon is, we're going to be putting
down a layer of wet, and then just meeting this
layer that we have over here. Just barely meeting it so that the edge of the paint that we have blends in with
this water over here. The point is that is so that we're getting
just like a very soft blend, not enough so that it
goes in a whole circle, and not so much
that we lose all of the shape that we tried to
create with this crescent, but just enough so that we still know that
the moon is a circle, it's just that we can
only see part of it, and that is how you
create a crescent moon. Because this is mostly water, you'll probably be able to, once it's dry, I'll
probably be able to erase those pencil
line right here, but this is one of my
very favorite ways to create a crescent moon
just because it looks so much more natural I think than drawing a real Crescent. The drawing of the
real Crescent can look super cute like illustrated, but this is how to create a more realistic
but still loose, and abstract crescent
moon by having the key here is having the water
meet the water over here. We're not starting, and
then pushing it this way. We're starting with
it wet over here, and just barely
touching the edge of the crescent so that it just barely starts to bleed
into this other wet space. That's the crescent
moon practice that, and when we move on to
our final projects, we going to do two
different projects. One is just painting a full
moon with a night sky, and then another one is
painting three different phases of the moon on one
single piece of paper, which is a popular design, but it's pretty fun, so I
thought I'd tackle that. Decide what you'd
like to do best, or if you want to try out
both, then let's go ahead, and do both, but either way, I will see you soon.
9. Final Project 1: Part 1: Welcome to our final
project, number 1. For this first final project, I want to do two for this
watercolor moon class because, I think that there are two really cool
ways to look at how to use a watercolor moon
in some frameable way. The first, is to create a traditional moonscape where there's a moon in the night sky. That's what we're
going to do today. I have already used one of my circular guides to create this big full moon
that we're going to do. Then we're going to have this
full moon be just hanging out in a dark blue night sky. It's a pretty simple one, but they can look pretty
cool when you put the two contrasting
things together. First things first, I'm
going to wet my circle. This is again, we're practicing the full
moon tutorial here. I drew this big circle and the first thing that I'm going
to do is get it all wet. Now because this is
a final project, I am using my professional
watercolor paper. This is a Blick Premier
watercolor paper block. The block just means that, as opposed to all
of the sheets being held together by glue on only one side like in a
traditional pad or a notebook, they are glued on all four sides and that just keeps
the paper more taut. Essentially, it's like
I'm taping down my paper, but they're already all pre-taped and then once
I'm done painting, this painting, I'm going to
cut off this sheet of paper. Cut it out with a knife, just a knife or a pair of
scissors or something. I cut through the glue and pull off my sheet of
paper and there you go. I like using watercolor
blocks because you don't have to do really any
prep work to get the paper ready for watercolor, especially when painting moons like this with big
washes of water. But they can be more expensive. If you don't have a
block, that's okay. I would recommend
you taping down your piece of paper with painter's tape or some
tape that's nice to paper. My moon is all wet.
Notice I was very carefully trying to stay
within the lines here. I'm going to use some of my
Payne's gray for the moon. Then I'm going to be using the wild thorn indigo
for the sky after. This Payne's gray is already a little bit dark and that's okay. I'm just blending this in, leaving some white spaces
like we've practiced. Then using water to blend
the pigment into the circle. If you've watched
the whole class, you've watched me do
this many times by now. You may have also tried it
along with me a few times. It can be tricky to get
the hang of blending in the pigment so that it
doesn't look like you just have big globs of pigment
on this piece of paper, while maintaining
the white space. I think that it's a skill
that honestly needs practice, but it's also a skill that any beginner can master
with a few tries. Which is also why
I like to start out these classes with a
few different tutorials, so you have lots of
different chances to try before jumping into a
final project with me. I a moving on to my second
layer of pigment here. Doing that same thing, just dotting, not brushing. I'm not stroking the paint
all over because that would move the pigment into
some of the white spaces, which is what I don't want. I want the white
spaces to remain. I'm just dotting my brush with the clean water and making
sure to check for puddles. It looks like some of the paint is paddling along this side. Very common for even when you are using a watercolor block
or even when your paper is taped down for the paper
to bulge up in the middle while it's wet and have all of the water and paint
rushed to the edges. That's something to look
out for and easily fixable. You just mop up any excess. Try to blend in the colors as evenly as possible
even with gravity trying to pull everything down
and move forward that way. So I'm going to do one more layer of really
fairly dark pigment here. One thing to note with
this final project, because I know that I'm
going to have a sky, a night sky that's
a deep dark indigo, I'm going to have my night
sky be as dark as possible. I want the dark spots of the
moon to just be a little lighter than I normally would if I was painting only the
moon with a white background. Just because the
lighter the moon is, the more contrast is going to
show against the night sky. I paint the moon before
I paint the sky, because the paint for the sky is going
to be darker than the moon so I can easily paint on top of the pencil lines and not have any paint
lines show through. If I painted the sky first, then it would look a little less seamless
if that makes sense. If I paint on top of the moon, just along the very edges so that it gets rid
of the pencil marks, then it looks a little more
smooth doing it that way. Just in general, going from light to dark, like
we've talked about, is a better way to get your layers to be more
smoothly joined together. I think I'm going to bring a little more
to the center here, but then I'm going to
call that mostly good. This is the point where you
can either wait for it to dry or you can dry it yourself
with a hand dryer. I'm going to dry it
with a hand dryer, but you don't want
to listen to that so there's going to be a little transition here [LAUGHTER] while I dry
it with the hand dryer, but you won't even notice. Hang on just a sec.
10. Final Project 1: Part 2: This layer is dry, and now I'm going
to paint my sky. Like I said, I did the moon with my Daniel
Smith Payne's gray, and now I'm going
to do the sky with this rich indigo color
from Wildthorne. I can never decide if I want to do first to get things wet first or if I
want to put paint on first. I think I'm going get
things wet first. I'm going to just paint very carefully around some
wetness around this Moon. Now, we're covering a bigger surface
are, at least I am. I'm using a 7 by 10
inch paper block, and so it's okay to do this
a little bit at a time. I'm going to do the bottom
half of this moon first, maybe just this side. I don't want to do the full bottom because
then it's going to be harder to paint the top. I like my landscape paintings like this when I'm
not using tape. I like to have a brushy
feel to the edge, so that's what I'm
doing with my water. Then once I get to
the top up here, I'm going to put on the paint in the water that
I've just laid down. It's going to look really cool. Still wet, just want to
make sure it's still wet. I'm going to grab some of
this rich Wildthorne indigo and just watch as it goes. I'm going to put this
along the edges first, a lot like not along the moon, and then I'm going to go back and do some very clean edges, crisp edges alongside the moon. The trick with painting
large surface areas like this is if you leave the
paint and part of it dries, like down here if I
let this part dry, especially if I'm planning to have a bit lighter at
the bottom, which I'm not, but if I were then this is going to be a paint line that is going to be
hard to get rid of. But I'm planning to
put darker paint on top of it so it should be fine. Just something to note
though when you're painting with large surface areas. Now I'm going very
carefully around the moon with my paintbrush. Not going too fast. It's okay if I accidentally touch part
of the moon, no big deal. We're just going to eyeball it. If that happens, then I'm just going to
make sure my edges are still smooth for the most
part all the way around, but I don't want to see any white between the
sky and the moon. That's what I don't
want. Then like I said, because this paint is
darker than the moon, it's going to look pretty
seamless even if I have to layer a little bit on top of the edge to
get rid of that pencil line. Also, as you noticed, I just turned my paper around so I can get a
better angle to paint. That's one of the
benefits of not taping your paper down and
using a paper block, is that you can move your paper to get the better angles that
you're looking for. Now that I've painted
the edge of this moon, I'm going to bring this
paint forward and down, and I'm not going to go all the way down to
the edge of the paper, but to the edge of where
I want my scene to be. I'm just putting water, I'm not putting any more paint. I'm going to put more
paint after I've laid down the water like I
did for the other side. But now because I've
diluted a lot of my water and because I'm not really taking the time to wash
off my brush all the way, what I'm doing is
basically painting a very light value
of this indigo. This is a good chance for you to see what this indigo looks
like in a very light value. Now I want to start
moving this side too, because if I don't I could
get some dried paint lines. That's okay because
we're going to paint over them
with darker colors. I still want to
maintain this brushy texture along the side, but not get too far
on the side just so I can still have that
frame that I'm looking for. Very carefully
outline this moon, bring the paint over like that. I'm almost done
putting water down, and then I'm going to
put more paint down because the whole thing I want to be this
dark indigo color. I still want to
have some texture, that's the beauty of watercolor, is when you put watercolor down parts of it it looks almost like
it's rippled sometimes, so I want to maintain that look, but I don't want it to be
as light as it is now. Now I'm going to add my color. This Wildthorne indigo
is just so rich. It's from the her
ocean sediment pack in case you're wondering. I believe she accepts
customer requests for orders, and then if you sign
up for her newsletter, she also does restocks
once every month or so. After she's handmade more
of very popular sets, she'll do restocks for
ready to ship paint. That's usually what I go for. I've never really ordered any custom ones from her before, not because I haven't wanted to, just because I don't
think about it. I usually just wait for
the restocks to happen. Now I'm putting this dark blue, making sure it's going
along the edge of the moon and covering up
some of the pencil lines. Notice my moon is not really
a perfect circle anymore. That's okay too. Nature is not perfect. That's my [inaudible] when
painting things like this. Now that I have most of
my color in most places, I'm just going to make sure to put it everywhere and get rid of any dried paint
lines that might've happened while I was
painting this moon. You can tell a dried paint
lines because you can see an actual line of paint
where something has dried. As long as you go over it
with this really dark color, then you should
get rid of it just fine. That's what I'm doing. You might not be able to notice, but my paper is still warping a little bit even
on the paper block. That is normal. Well, first of all, if
you frame a painting, the ripple in the
painting is not going to show unless you have some
weird frame where it does. But in my experience it won't. But if you really
just want to try to get your paper as flat
again as possible, the trick is to flatten it while the painting
is still a little bit damp. Not while it's very wet, but while it's still
just a little bit damp, put some protective plastic or something over it in a way that it won't mess
with the paint. But then just stack a bunch
of books on top of it and leave it there for a day,
and it should flatten it. I've done that before, I don't really do
that as much anymore. Just because if I frame
something I find it goes away and then I
don't have to worry about going through that
flattening process, but if it's something
that interests you, then there is a way to try to flatten your paintings
once they're done. I'm almost done. I'm just trying to connect these two wet spots so that we don't have any
more paint lines. If you hold on just a second, I'm going to add some finishing touches and we'll be done with
this final project. But first I'm going to
wait for this to dry, just a little bit more
darkness over here. First I'm going to
wait for this to dry. But again, the trickiness of video editing will mean that you won't even notice my absence. So just hang tight. Now that our night sky is dry, I'm just going to
add in a few stars. If you've ever painted
landscape scenes with me, you know that usually I
splatter stars because, in my experience it is
very hard to make stars look random when you are
drawing them in yourself. But this time I thought it could be cool to
have a little more of an illustrated look and
hand put in the stars. The thing with the
full moon also is that you don't
necessarily want to have tons of stars because
the moon is so bright that not a lot of stars
will be showing probably. But I'm just using my uni-ball
signal white gel pen here. I'm painting in a few random
stars all around this moon. Just as a final finishing touch. Some of them are clumped, some of them are not. You can make some of them into a pattern or a
constellation if you want. Like if you just had a ripple of stars going up over here. If you're going to do a
pattern or a ripple of stars, make sure that the stars aren't all the same distance apart. Because when you do that, it doesn't look
quite as natural, but that's okay if it is. Ultimately, we're just trying to add a little bit of texture
and character here, and drawing in stars
can be good practice. Because splattering
stars, while fun, while I think is
the easiest way to create realistic looking stars, takes all the really most of the control out of it for you. So this could be a fun way to practice how you
think stars should look. I'm just going around, and I'm going to stop
pretty soon with the stars. Then a few, I'm going to add some twinkling stars
in just a second. Just filling in some space. I'm just about done. Some of these stars,
turns over here. I'm going to call that good
for the little dot stars, and now I'm just going to add a few little crosses and then a little
shooting star up here. There's just a little
night scene with our moon. That's final project number 1. You can do whatever you want. You don't have to paint
this little night scene of stars and other
things that I did. But this is one way that I really like to showcase
the moon, as you can see, even though I have a few different celestial
elements here, the moon is very much
the center of the piece. With the indigo night sky, it really shines through. It's one of my favorite
ways to paint moons, to paint the moon first and then paint
the sky on top of it, and I encourage you to try it. But if you are
looking for something else or something in addition, Let's move on to the
next final project. We'll be painting
a full moon and two crescent moons to show three different
phases of the moon. That'll be super
fun. See you there.
11. Final Project 2: Welcome to final
project number 2. Now you may not be able to see the lines because
they're very faint. But I have drawn using my
little palette as a guide, three circles here and I've already used
the needed eraser to make the lines a little
bit less prominent. But I can still see them. But just so you know, I drew my three moons because we're going to do three
different phases, not all the phases, but we are going to do
three different phases. We're going to do a crescent
moon facing this way, and then the full moon and then a crescent moon
facing this way, just as a fun little design. One note, when you're drawing
your circles on here, I would recommend drawing the two sides first
and then placing your circle in the
middle because it's easier to gauge
spacing that way. But that is totally up to you. I've already drawn
these and now I'm going to get started painting the moons.You can decide if you want the moon's to all be the same
color or different colors. I think I'm going to have all of my moons be some kind
of shade of that, this wild thorn indigo color. First, I'm going to start with this moon on the far side. I'm only painting in the
crescent shape with water because I've already drawn in the lines to make
the crescent shape. I'm being careful
to stay inside the lines.This is mostly going to be the same process
for all of these moons that we are painting
in this project. If you really like painting
in real-time with me, then I encourage you to grab
your own sheet of paper. Notice this piece of
paper is a little bigger than my first
final project paper. It's still a blick premier
water color block, but it is size 10 by 14 inches. Just a little bigger. Now I'm going to
use my palette to get a lighter color value of
this Indigo that I have on here and just put some pigment on here because
I know it's a smaller moon. I don't have to
go too overboard. Once I have that on there, then I'll start blending. By now.This is old art you have. I think that's such
a funny phrase. I had a professor in college who used to
use it all the time. Anyway and I don't
think I've really said out of my own
volition very often, but I did just then,
so there you go. But it was just pointing
out that you've seen me blend these lots
of times by now, but hopefully seeing it over
and over and over again is useful to you and
helps you figure out exactly the way that
works best for you. I'm adding just a
little more pigment to the paint that I
have on here already. I don't want it to be
too dark just yet. Then I washed off
my brush so that I can blend in this color with a clean brush so that I'm not just adding more
pigment than I intend. That's the whole point of
using a clean brush and having always having some
clean water as well. I'm going to put a little bit I like to have a little
bit on the sides. At least some places, maybe just the corner
of this crescent. Again, we're making sure that if we remember our crescent
tutorial, that the side, the edge of the crescent
on the inside of the moon never gets dry
because if it's dry, then we get paint
lines before we get a chance to blend it
in with the rest of the moon and we don't want that. I would just pay
attention to that. Do this process until you
feel like, you're done. Now you may notice, it looks like I've left
very little whitespace here because if I add more
dark pigment to contrast, then it's still going to
look pretty light and that's the most important thing
to remember when it comes to painting moons, is to maintain the contrast. It's just easier to do when
you have more whitespace. But if you accidentally
got rid of most of it. Just make sure that you have that it's still
light enough for you that you can add darker
pigment on top of it and it will provide
that contrast that we're looking for within
the moon and then, I found some tendrils plate of paint that looked a little like they
had those little spider legs I was talking about. I don't really want
that so I was just going through and manually
blending some of this again, pushing some paint out of the way to make
room for more white space.But now I'm feel
pretty good about that. I'm going to back with water
starting over here remember. I'm going to meet the crescent. Just barely touches the
edge so that the paint barely blends in with this
wet space that I've created. Just so the color
just barely touches it and then I'm going to fill
in the rest of the circle. Just for the sake of consistency and making
sure that you don't have any paint lines come up that you don't necessarily
that you don't want.That's why I'm completing the circle even though my paint, my water by now is
slightly tinted blue, which is not what you want. You definitely want
clean water if you can, but especially if your water is tinted slightly
different color. That's an even reason
to complete the circle, even though we really only want the crescent to be the star
of the show at this point. Crescent number one. Now let's do our full moon. I'm going to do it the
same Indigo color. Some of my pencil line has disappeared a little
bit, but that's okay. I'm kind of eyeballing
it here and calling mostly
complete circle good. That looks good.Another reason to do these over and
over and over again is because the more you do, the faster you get at them. That's just one of
painting these a lot. I guess that's me just
rationalizing having so many of these real-time tutorials for you to watch me painting these moons over and
over and over again. Because that's the
way that I learned. I'm self-taught as I have
mentioned in the intro of this class.In other places, if you follow me on social media or if you've taken any
of my other classes, I taught myself how to do this. I've never been to art school or taken anything like that. Watching people do techniques like this over and over
and over again is how I learned how to figure out what they did
and then from there, figure out how to tweak their techniques
even more so that they worked better for me.I
would highly recommend that, that's why I love
skillshare so much because, you get to learn from Sony different kinds of
people and you get to learn so many different kinds of ways of whatever skill
you're trying to learn. Because they're
just regular people who know how to do
something and are showing you the way
that they do it so the more you can see
how other people do it the better you'll be
able to figure out how it's going to look the best for you, how that technique
is going to work the best for you. Because not all of
them are the same and not all artists
are the same. That not every
technique is going to make a complete
perfect sense. I think that's why taking
as many classes as you can is typically a
good route to go. I'm going to do one more, I think one more layer of this dark pigment and then
I'm gonna move on to my last crescent.and that will
be my moon design. I always try to be careful. Just as another bonus, not to add too much paint but also not to
make it too much, so it looks like I've
just put globs of paint. That's why I always go
back once I've put it down and manually blend it, blend this paint in
different places. Because otherwise it just looks like there are
little spots around. While watercolor does
move around by itself, and sometimes you don't have to manually move the
pigment in order to get it to look a little
natural, sometimes you do. I've said this lots of times, but mostly I like to reiterate it because
whenever I look at moonscapes or galaxies or any other blending
projects like this, I'm most unhappy usually
because it looks like I've just plopped some paint on there and doesn't look
quite how I envisioned. That's what I've discovered typically is the trick for me, is to make it look as natural as possible and not so that I've just dropped globs of paint. But so that they blend
in really naturally, have a nice shape and
movement to them. As you can see, when I'm blending in these
colors with my brush, I don't always just drop and go, I usually try to put
it in some shape. I don't always have a
plan for those shapes, they just manifest themselves. They don't always turn out
exactly the way that I want, but by letting myself loose and not focusing too much on
the exact shape of it, that helps me in
the future figure out what shapes I do like
and what ones I don't. Because then I can
analyze like, "Well, what worked with this piece, and what didn't, and
how can I change it?" That's just something
to think about. I think I'm done
with the full moon. That just leaves
this final crescent, and then this piece
will be finished. The same thing, I am painting in the crescent. Then I'm going to put
my paint on here with the same indigo color that
I have on my palette. I also think that painting moons just over and
over again like this can be really
therapeutic I guess, because you're just
going back and forth and back and forth and
blending colors together. It's really fun to
watch, I think. It's fun to watch what
water does to watercolor and watch what happens when you add even darker pigment
to what you're working with. Because honestly, the
reason I paint isn't so much that I can
become art teacher, it's because I loved watching it
myself and I still do. I still love watching what
water does to this paint. I love watching watercolors
swirl around in general. It's one of my very favorite
things to watch and so it's become one of my very favorite things
to do for that reason. I hope that that's
true for you too. I hope that's one of
the reasons why you really love working
with watercolor, because it can just be so
relaxing to sit down and watch paint do its thing with
minimal effort from you. Like a little bit of effort, but still pretty minimal. I'm nearly done. Just going to blend in these
last few bits over here. Maybe add just this little bit along the edge to connect with this over here, and making sure to
blend in any of the spidery tendrils that I don't necessarily want because
I want them to be smooth. But for the most part, that looks pretty good to me. Now starting from this side, as a right-handed person
is tricky but doable. You just have to
be very careful. I'm just meeting with clean
water paint over here. Starting over here and making
sure to bring the water from the paper to
the crescent so that the crescent
still maintains its shape for the most part. That's the key to maintaining shapes of any kind really using the
wet-on-wet technique. It's not going to stay
exactly a crescent shape, but the water is contained mostly and that's because I didn't push the
pigment in any way, I just pushed some water to barely meet that
line of pigment, that line of
watercolor that we've created so that it blends
just a little bit. That's my goal there. There
is my phases of the moon. Final project with a crescent facing this way and a
crescent facing this way. I can never remember which one is supposed to
be waxing and waning. If you do, fully for you, if not, that's okay too. I think that final projects like this can be
really beautiful on nursery walls or children's walls or
just any walls really. This is a design that I think is pretty popular on
Pinterest and elsewhere. Now, you have learned to create it all for
your very self. Thank you so much for
joining me for this class. If you really want to give me a shout-out
and give me some love, the best thing you can
do is leave a review. The more reviews I have, the more people are able to
see this class and take it. If you loved it and you want to tell
more people about it, I would really encourage
you to leave a review. I would also encourage you
to post your final projects, whether you just did
one or you did both or something completely
different with your moon. I would encourage you to
post your final projects to the project gallery
so that I and the other students can
send you some love. Also, if you post this
on Instagram and tag me, my handle is this, writing desk. You may have a chance
to be featured in my stories and I
will definitely like and comment on your picture because I just would love
to see what you're doing. I'm going to cover a lot of
this in the recap as well. But before you head out, I just wanted to touch on
those things and to say, thank you again for
joining me in painting these watercolor moons.
See you next time.
12. Recap: Thank you so much
again for joining me for my Watercolor Moons Class. If you painted along with me
and did the final projects. We painted this night sky, this full moon hanging in the night sky
illustration and we also painted this illustration of different phases of the moon. I am in love with both of these designs and I
hope that you are too, even if you didn't come up with the designs that we
did in the class. I hope that you love
the skills that you've learned and
that you can continue practicing moons and
practicing these techniques to have joy and
whatever you create. I mentioned this before, but if you really
loved this class, the best thing that you can
do to help other people find it and to take it
is to leave a review. It would really help me and I also really love to
hear what you thought of this class and
ways I can improve and make your experience
on Skillshare better. I'm happy to hear any and
all of your thoughts. Also, if you just love the project that you came up with and you want to post it, please feel free to post
it to the project gallery so that me and the other
students can show you so love and give you some
tips and if you decide you love it so much you
want to post it to social media, I'm on Instagram. My handle is this writing desk, and I would love to be your biggest cheerleader
there as well. Plus a few times a month I do features of all my
Skillshare classes. If you post your
final project and you tag me on Instagram, there's a chance that you will
be featured in my stories. That's all I have for
you for this recap. If you enjoyed this class, I also have lots of other
classes on wilderness themes. I just released a class on florals themes a
couple of weeks ago. If you're watching
this in May 2019. I would love to have you in
any of those classes as well. But if not, be on the lookout for other classes I
release in the future. Either way, I can't
wait to have you join any of my other classes
and to see your work. I hope that you found this class fruitful for you and that you can continue
your watercolor journey. Thanks for painting with
me. See you next time.
Kolbie Blume, Artist
