Transcripts
1. intro: Hi, my name is Kolbie and I love painting
watercolor night skies. I am so excited to share
this class with you. Painting watercolor night
skies is what brought me into painting landscapes in
the first place because, with just a few
simple techniques, you can paint a really
stunning piece. This is my classic
night sky piece. If you follow me on Instagram, I've painted variations
of this design for years. So many people have developed a love and passion
for watercolor because of this piece and
it makes me so happy. In this class, we're going
to learn how to paint my classic night sky
watercolor design and, we're also going to learn
how to paint three more. With that, we're
going to learn how to paint this design, and this design, and this design,
all in this class. All of these designs
you can paint using my simple
landscape recipe method, which I'm going to talk about throughout the
course of this class. If all of that sounds
right up your alley, I would love for you to join me.
2. materials: Before we get started, let's go over all of the materials you'll
need for this class. First, let's talk
about paintbrushes. When I'm doing watercolor, I like to use paintbrushes
that are round-shaped. The brushes I'm using
for this class are this size number 10 in the
Princeton Neptune Series. You recognize it by the brown wood handle
and the gold ferrule. It has this series,
the Neptune series. It's Princeton's most similar to a real sable hair paintbrush, but it's synthetic, so both of these are
synthetic sable hair, meaning no animals
were harmed in the process of making
these brushes. That's round number 10, and then round number 0. This is Utrecht brand, their Synthetic Sablette series. I really like this series. You'll recognize it
by the black handle and the silver ferrule. I think it most compares
to Princeton Heritage, probably, and some
of my favorites. I'm only using these
two paintbrushes. Then paint, I have
an assortment here. This is my own compilation
of some Daniel Smith, some Winsor & Newton, all artist-grade paint, but you can use whatever
paint you have on hand. Honestly, whatever you have
on hand is going to be fine, but I just thought it
would be helpful for you to see what I'm using. For the individual projects, we're doing four
night sky projects. I will talk about the
specific paint colors I'm using in those
projects, but for now, just know that I have a mix of Daniel Smith
and Winsor & Newton, but you can use
whatever you wish. Then also for paint, I'm using this Dr. Ph. Martin's Bleed Proof
White for stars. You can use whatever
white gouache you have on hand or a white gel pen. This is a Sakura Gelly
Roll White gel pen. Next, paper. For practice, I always like to use
student-grade paper, so I'm using some Canson
watercolor paper. It is 140 pounds, which means that when you
have a ream or 500 sheets, it weighs 140 pounds, and it's cold-pressed, which means it has a
little bit of tooth to it. Whenever I am using
watercolor paper, I always like to use
at least 140 pounds in weight just so that it can hold water a little bit better. Then for the final projects, this is professional
watercolor paper. It's Blick Premier
watercolor paper, so that means it's made of 100 percent cotton
and also 140 pounds. I'm going to be using this paper for three of our projects. Then for one, I thought I'd bust out my round
watercolor block. This is Magnani 1404. It's made in Italy. I got it from Blick online, and I thought it
would be fun to show you a night sky in
this round form, so that will be one of the
[NOISE] project videos. Next, I always like to have a few Q-tips on hand just to mop up some water and masking tape for taping down your
paper if you don't have a watercolor block
and a mixing palette, in case you need to mix
colors in a non-diluted way. It's nice to have
a mixing palette. This is a ceramic palette that I picked up from a
small business owner, and then two cups of
water off to the side. I always like to
have one cup that's clean and one cup that's dirty, especially when I'm
doing gradients like we're doing with
these night skies. Gather up all your materials, and let's move on
to the next video.
3. techniques: Let's go over some
of the techniques that we're going to be
using in this class. The basic techniques that we're going to use in
this class and in every watercolor piece
really are called the wet-on-wet technique and
the wet-on-dry technique. The wet on dry technique happens when you paint with
wet watercolor, that's the wet part, on a dry surface. That's the dry part.
So when the paper is dry and you paint
with your watercolor, that is called the
wet-on-dry technique. The wet-on-dry technique
is characterized by crisp lines, clear boundaries. So where you paint
with your paintbrush, that's where the paint goes. The wet-on-dry technique
is useful for details and painting subjects that are meant to have a very specific shape. So I think the wet-on-dry technique is what
a lot of people think of when they
first start painting. But the real magic
of watercolor, especially when
creating gradients, is called the
wet-on-wet technique. That is what happens when
you paint on a wet surface. So if you get the paper that
you're painting on wet with paint or wet with water and
then you start painting, you see how the watercolor
blooms wherever it's wet. That's because watercolor
is activated by water. So the pigment wants to move
wherever it can find water. When you get your
paper wet first, the pigment doesn't have to stay restricted wherever
your paintbrush goes. It can move about freely. So depending on how
much water you have on your paintbrush
and on the paper and in your paint
and depending on the quality of paper you're using and the quality
of paint you're using, there are granted a
lot of variables. The paint will move in a lot
of different directions and at varying speeds and
varying looseness. So one thing that I recommend doing before
you start painting, especially before
you start painting, your final project is to experiment with the
wet-on-wet technique, especially to see what
happens when you use different amounts of water and different amounts
of paint to water. Just to get a feel
for the way that watercolor reacts with water. Especially how using the
wet-on-wet technique, how different colors react
together on a wet surface. Just a hint, that
is what we're going to be focusing on
in the next video where we learn about gradients. But if you want to head start, you can mix together
different colors right on your paper using the
wet-on-wet technique. Personally, I think
that this technique really is what
makes watercolor so magical because the watercolor just blends by itself
and does its own thing. You really are more of
like a guide to let the watercolor explore
its full potential by allowing it to move
around in the water. So I am in love with watercolor and the
wet-on-wet technique, and I love using it to
make magical gradients, especially for night skies. So I'm really excited for
the rest of this class. In the meantime, keep practicing the
wet-on-dry technique and the wet-on-wet technique. Now let's move on
to the next video.
4. monochrome gradients: We've learned about the wet-on-dry technique and
the wet-on-wet technique, and now we're going to
talk about how to use the wet-on-wet technique
to create gradients. Gradient is what happens
when you move from one color to another
color gradually. It's like you can't even see where the exact
change happens. Gradients with watercolor
are especially fun, and the wet-on-wet
technique is very important to succeeding in
creating smooth gradients. What you do is you
lay down some water, clean water if you have it. That's why I like to
have two cups of water, one to stay clean, and one to wash off
my brush in-between. Lay down some water, and then we're going to practice first a monochrome gradient, meaning we're only
going to use one color. I'm going to take
some Payne's gray. I'm using Winsor & Newton
Payne's gray which is like a navy or a dark blue. Starting from the top
of this wet space, I'm going to move
from edge-to-edge on this wet space and go all
the way down my paper. Once I've gone all the way down, I'm going to pick up even more dark pigment and
do it basically again. The key with gradients and keeping things
from light to dark, is remembering that you
can always make something darker if it's too light but you can't always
make something lighter. It's tricky with watercolor, because you don't really use white to create light things, you use the white
space of the paper. You really need to
pay attention to, especially for
monochrome gradients, how light the bottom
of your paper is and how light you want it to be. If I want the top of my
gradient to be a lot darker than the bottom but I want the bottom
to stay the same, then I would put
my pigment up on the top and while
it's still wet, I'm doing all this fairly quickly because gradients
really only work while the paint is still
wet with watercolor anyway. I'm going to wash
off my paintbrush, and then starting from the
bottom with clean water, I'm doing the same
edge-to-edge movements, but instead I'm going
from the bottom-up so that I don't get any more dark pigment
along the bottom, but I'm able to smooth out the
colors from top to bottom. I'm going to do
that one more time, starting from the bottom, to smooth out the colors and create this gradient
from dark to light. Then I'm going to go
from the top again and stop before I get
too close to the bottom, wash off my paintbrush, and do it one more time. I say one more time, but really
what I mean is keep doing this until I'm happy
with my gradient. I am pretty happy with that. This process that
I did just now, starting with Payne's gray and then making a
monochrome gradient, so I'm only using
Payne's gray from very light and watery to pretty dark, is the process for creating the first night sky that we're going to do for
our first final project. Keep this in mind. But, this is how you create
a monochrome gradient. It's clean wash of water, starting with the pigment on
top and going edge-to-edge, smooth all the way down, and doing that until you feel like the bottom is
as light as you want it. Then back-and-forth
between using a clean brush from the bottom, going up, and then more pigment
from the top going down, over and over again, top to bottom and then
bottom to top until you feel like you have a
nice smooth gradient. That is the monochrome gradient. The next video will be a
multi-chrome gradient.
5. multichrome gradients: Now that we have done
monochrome gradient, let's move on to how to create a gradient
with multiple colors. First, I'm going to
start with duochrome, meaning only two colors. It's going to be the same,
and I'm actually going to turn this around
and do it this way. A very similar process as
the monochrome gradient, meaning we're going to start
with a clean wash of water. I'm using clean water
to prep my paper, and this is where my
paint is going to go. The reason I start with
wet-on-wet is so that the paint doesn't dry before I get a
chance to blend it together. Sometimes I paint night skies
without doing the wet wash, but you have to move very quickly in order
to move the paint, and blend it together in a watery blend so that you don't get any dried paint
lines in order to do that. I think it took a lot of practice for me
to get to that point. But not to say that
you shouldn't try. I just believe that
it's easier to start with this wash
of clean water. The two colors that I'm
going to blend together are turquoise color
and a purple color. I know that sounds like it
wouldn't be a pretty blend, but its actually is. Will show you how that goes. This is phthalo turquoise,
Winsor & Newton. I'm starting from the top. Then I'm getting
lighter and lighter. [NOISE] That happens
naturally with watercolor because the farther you
go down on the paper, the less pigment you
have on your brush. The water also helps all
of that blend naturally, where is darker at the top, and lighter toward
where I stopped. That's just because
there's less and less pigment to move around. Before I move onto
my next color, I'm just starting
from the bottom of the turquoise portion like I did in the monochrome gradient, starting from the bottom
with a clean brush, and moving up just
so I can smooth out this bottom portion so that it's blending nicely
in with the water, but I don't get too much of this dark pigment
down in this portion. The next, I'm going
to take up my purple, which is perylene violet. I'm going to start
from the bottom, and do the same process. I'm moving into the
turquoise a little bit. Now that I've laid down
the initial color, I'm going to do just one
more little layer of perylene violet and honestly
of each color so I can get a darker bottom and a darker
top of the turquoise. Then we're going to blend
the two colors together. [NOISE] I'm doing all of this while the
paint is still wet. The paint being wet is
what allows it to be malleable enough
to blend together. If this was dry, then watercolor when it's dry especially artist-grade
watercolor does not reactivate, it stays put. You have to do this while it's wet or you'll get
dried paint lines. Now that I've put a bunch
of pigment on both sides, I'm going to again, starting with a clean
brush from the bottom, work my way up, and then clean off my brush, and start from the top
and work my way down, and then stopping in the middle. Multi-chrome gradients
is just a practice and going back and
forth and back and forth until you
create that middle layer. That's a mix of the two colors. When it comes to turquoise
and perylene violet, the mix of the two colors
is this dark blue color, and that's going
on in the center. You want to go back
and forth until it's smooth from one
side to the other. Just like that.
Creating gradients with watercolor really is a practice
in patience, definitely. It requires you to also
know when to stop, and know when to
put on more paint. The more you practice it,
the better you'll be. But ultimately, it's starting
with a wash of clean water, one color on top, one color on bottom, and then going back
and forth from bottom to top until you create this smooth transition from
one color to the next. That was duochrome. Now I'm going to do
a quick multichrome. I have another
separate sunset class, and I talk a little bit about
this in that class as well. Instead of just
using two colors, we're going to use three. I'm going to start with
indigo at the top. I'm just going to brush
a little bit of it on. Then I'm going to use some
yellow at the bottom. I'm going to brush a little
bit of it on at the bottom. Then I'm going to leave a
third of this spot clear of paint and put in
some queen rose, which is pink, and blend
that in with both sides. When I blended it
in with both sides, it was starting in the
middle of the queen rose, and then moving
either up or down. Make sure when you're
creating gradients, especially multichrome
gradients, if you're going to switch
from one color to the next, to wash off your brush in-between so that you
don't accidentally paint unwanted color onto a
section that you don't want. Now I'm just going from
bottom to top all the way. Going all the way from bottom to top works with these colors, especially because I'm starting with the lightest
color at the bottom and it's slowly coming off of
my paintbrush as I move up. I'm not putting yellow really
at the top in the blue. By the time I get to the blue, the yellow is pretty
much already gone. That's the process that I use to create multichrome gradients. It's very similar to
monochrome gradients, just probably a little
bit more blending, a little bit more washing off of your paintbrush so that
you have clean water, and a clean paintbrush
that doesn't accidentally mix colors
that you don't want mixed. Like I said before, the wet-on-wet technique is very important to this process. Now that we've
practiced gradients, let's move on to
what I like to call landscape recipes so that we know what we're
going to be painting, and we can figure
out what to paint for our four projects, and then we're going to put
all of this into practice by painting four different
watercolor night skies.
6. landscape recipes: Before I start painting, I like to make a plan. I don't always make a
plan like a sketch, but especially if
I'm doing a series or if I'm trying to
learn a new technique, I like to map out
exactly what I'm practicing and exactly
what I'm painting so that it's a little more
of a process rather than haphazardly
putting paint on paper. Which by the way, I am definitely not against haphazardly putting
paint on paper. I think it can be really fun to free paint and let loose of control and let loose
your inner mess. But for this class, for these night skies, I find it really
helpful to break down the subjects and the
parts of the painting so that you can take the
different parts we've practiced and paint all
kinds of night skies that aren't exact copies of mine so that you can look
at colors and you can look at subjects or photos of
night skies and know exactly how to mix and match and create your own
landscape recipes. First, I like to break down
particularly this night sky where it's really just
like a simple night sky with a few subjects into
two different categories. First, the type of sky. When I create
simple, nice skies, gradient night skies
they're always in a gradient and that could be either
monochrome gradient or a multi-chrome gradient. Multi-chrome can also
encompass dual chrome. Monochrome, meaning
sometimes I'm only using one color like we did in the monochrome
gradients lesson where I only used Payne's gray. This Payne's gray is probably if you've looked at
my Instagram before, Payne's gray is one of my
classic night sky colors. Though a monochrome
gradient can look very beautiful and
so can multi-chrome with lots of different
colors based on if it's Twilight or some weird things
are going on in the sky, sometimes skies can look lots of different
colors at night. Monochrome or multi-chrome are two options for the sky and
then within those options, you can either have
a textured night sky or a smooth night sky. What we practiced with
gradients is more like a smooth
gradient night sky. Actually let me pull up this multi-chrome
gradient picture here so this is actually a
pretty good representation. I like to say textured
is when different colors infiltrate a section
that is not their own. This dual chrome
gradient that we created with turquoise
and perylene violet, you can see the
violet infiltrating the turquoise over
here and vice versa. That wasn't necessarily
on purpose, I probably just stopped too soon in order to create
a smooth gradient, but it could have
been on purpose. If you want different colors to infiltrate
different sections, it can look really
cool and for skies like almost like there's
clouds in the sky that's hindering or
fog or chemicals, which is not fun
to think about but sometimes skies aren't
always smooth like this, sometimes they have a
little bit of texture. That's one category, one thing to think about when
creating your night sky. Then you can also have
a smooth night sky where it more
seamlessly moves from one color to the next and each color really stays
in their own section. The way that you get
these smooth gradients is like we practiced just going back and forth
and back and forth with enough water and pigment and
then stopping at some point, maybe even before you
think you should stop. But being very careful, going edge to edge and
making the same movements. You can have a
textured night sky or you can have a
smooth night sky. Once you've figured out
what you want for your sky, the next is to figure out what you want for
your silhouette. I really love night skies
because of this simple process, you really just have to
pick your sky and then pick whatever subject you want and paint it in black or
a really dark color. My typical go-to's are like a line of trees
at the bottom or a little mountain range or even a couple
rows of mountains, or some sharper
mountains like cliffs. You can even try your hand
at painting some humans or drawing in little tiny
human silhouettes or flora botanicals like I've
done desert botanicals before in a gradient sky
like this where I've had cacti and succulents
up against the sky. Whatever it is you choose, paint it in a dark color like black or highly
pigmented Payne's gray it's going to look
very cool against the gradient night
sky and that's partly because of
these constants. This is the last thing
I want to talk about in this landscape recipe video. There are two constants in my recipe for this night
sky landscape painting. First, the gradient always
goes dark at the top, too light at the bottom. Dark at the top and light
at the bottom creates the contrast that makes these
night skies look so cool. Because of the light
at the bottom, the silhouettes are
going to pop and really accentuate the night sky, and they're going to
accentuate the stars. So you're going to sprinkle
and we're going to practice that in the actual
final projects that we do, but we're going to use
white gouache to splatter white stars all across the dark of the top
of the night sky. These contrasting things, having dark and light
things together, the light at the
bottom night sky with a dark silhouette
and the dark sky with the white stars create just a really cool wilderness
kind of ethereal effect. I've found that this recipe of using different
skies, silhouettes, and having maintaining
this constant contrast creates just a stunning
landscape scene every time. With that, you can download
my landscape recipe handout, I created a little free version of this that looks a little
better on my website and pick whichever ones you
want and then we'll move on and you can watch me paint my final projects.
See you there.
7. grip + water control: I wanted to do a
quick video on grip, on how I hold my
paintbrush as I'm painting gradients for these
night skies especially, because I think it can be tricky if you're not exactly sure how the paintbrush
is supposed to go. To demonstrate this,
I'm going to do two little mini night
skies on this paper. For the first one, I'm just going to
do a mini night sky here and then grab
another piece of paper for the next one. After you've laid
down your wash of water on your painting
the gradient, it might be easy. You might be painting
the gradient like this. You're going edge to edge but it's still a little bit streaky. The problem when you're doing it this way
is that you're not, or rather let me
say it this way, when I want to do
my night skies, instead of going like
zigzags far apart like this, I'm using the whole of my brush. I'm putting enough pressure on it that all of
the bristles on my brush basically are
on the paper what. When I'm doing it that way, it's a lot easier
to maintain this smooth layering
all the way down. You don't want to put too
much pressure on it though, because if you put too
much pressure on a brush, like if you jam the
bristles into the paper. A, it's going to
probably ruin your brush and it's going to stop. You're going to create
enough friction that your paintbrush won't move. Another reason why
your gradients might not look as smooth as mine are if you're not
using enough water. If you don't have
enough water either on your paint or on your
paintbrush or on your paper, then the paint isn't
going to move anywhere. All of those three
places that I just said are important
places where you get water for painting with
watercolor in your palette, where your paint is, on your paintbrush,
and on the paper. On the paper you can
tell that there's not enough water because the paint
isn't blending together, it mostly stayed in this zigzag
effect that I was using. Even though you can see the paper was wet enough
that it blurred the strokes, so they still look a
little bit blurry. Honestly this looks cool, but it's not the smooth gradient that I was initially going for. If you are trying to do
your gradient and it just feels like you can't get
the smoothness correctly, then you might want to pay attention to how
much water is in the paint or on your
paintbrush or on the paper, and if you are having
the correct grip. Just to showcase
these two differences where this is what happened
when I use the correct grip, holding the paintbrush loose further down on the
handle like this, and I like to hold it with my two pointer and middle finger but that's
just my preference. I hold pencils this way too. Some people like to
hold it more like this. If you just hold
your paintbrush like this, loosen your hand, further up on the handle and straight almost like it's out of 45 degree
angle from the paper. Then use all of your
bristles of the brush to move your nice and watery
paintbrush down the paper. That's going to be a recipe for success for these
smooth gradients. Thank you so much and let's
move on to the next video.
8. classic night sky tutorial: For our first final project, I'm going to paint my classic version of a
watercolor night sky. Meaning it's going
to be monochrome and the silhouettes are going to be trees
along the bottom. First step is to
get your paper wet. As you can see beforehand, I taped down my paper. This is professional
watercolor paper. It's Blick Premier Watercolor
Paper, 100 percent cotton. I taped it down and you can
see a small hyper lapse of that process if
you've never done it before as a bonus video, at the end of this class. I taped down my paper and
now I'm just going to put the paint in here so you can
see me picking up the paint. We're using Winsor and
Newton's Payne's gray and I'm going to start at the top
and going edge to edge. Remember I like to go
edge to edge all the way down so I can get the pigment
all the way on the paper. I'm just going to move a
little bit from bottom to top here just to smooth out
some of the textures here. Remembering our
rule that you can always make something
darker if you need to, but it's really hard to
make something lighter. I'm going to take stock
of whether or not I think the bottom
could be darker. Meaning I don't really
care if I get it darker or if I need to keep it
as light as it is. I think that I do want
it to be very light, but I wouldn't mind if it was
just a little bit darker. It wouldn't ruin my piece if it got a little bit
darker than it is. But now at this point, that's about as dark
as I want the bottom, so I'm going to
focus on picking up some very pigmented
watercolor and putting it at the top and stopping about
two-thirds of the way down. Then picking up
more very diluted, not with water, that's
tricky wording, very pigmented
watercolor and just always starting from the
top and painting down so I can lay the
pigment down first. Now, I'm going to wash
off my paintbrush. Starting from the bottom with a wet and clean paintbrush, I'm going to paint from
edge to edge all the way up so that I can smooth out
these sections right here. As I'm smoothing these out, I'm noticing that maybe I want my night sky to extend
a little bit further, right there is where I still want it to be
a little bit dark. Knowing that I'm going to put down a little bit of
pigment over here, just down, so that's about three-fourths
of the way down now. I'm not really caring
about edge to edge at this point because I know that right now
I'm going to go back with my clean water, clean paintbrush, and
going from bottom to top, smooth out those sections
by going edge to edge and making this
gradient very smooth. This process of going back and forth and back and
forth to create a smooth gradient is how we
paint these nights skies. I'm just going to
keep doing this until I think it's about right and you can watch that
in this hyperlapse. [NOISE] Now that the sky is dry, I used an embossing heat
tool to dry my sky, let's splatter on some stars. I'm picking up my Dr. Ph
Martin's Bleedproof white and you can also use any white
gouache you have on hand. I'm picking up some of this
and using clean water. The trick with this
in particular is to definitely use clean
water while you're activating it and I'm going to make sure it's wet enough that it will
come off of my paintbrush, but not quite so wet
that it's very diluted. Practicing a few times would
probably be a good idea. But the essence of what
we're going to do is, I'm using my zero brush, hold the brush with your with your non-dominant hand and then with your
dominant hand, use basically your whole hand, at least two or three
fingers to tap the brush so that the paint comes
off of the paintbrush. I'm going to show
you that one more time at this angle
and then again at a side angle just so you can see the stars coming off
a little bit better. The reason that I start with the stars before the trees
is because I don't want the white paint to
get onto the trees and the reason that I
splatter the stars instead of painting them on
individually is because my mind just does not
do random very well. Whenever I try to paint or draw on a whole sky full of stars, my mind wants to space them out evenly
and it's just a lot more difficult to get this explosion of stars that I really like
to see in night skies. Splattering takes away
the human error of creating randomness and
makes it random anyway. It is a little messy. I get a lot of
questions about like, how do you not make a
mess by splattering? The answer is, I don't.
I do make a mess. But a few things to note, if you have too much water, like if you use more water than pigment, then
probably is good. You might get bigger
stars like some of these are the biggest stars I have on here and if you
get them to be too big, they might look more like
snow instead of stars. Which could be good,
maybe you want snow, but if you want them
to look like stars, I like my stars to look
lots of different sizes, but definitely more this middle size and that just
takes experimenting. A good rule of thumb is to know that the more water you use, the bigger the droplets are, and the less water you use, the smaller the droplets are. Water control also has
a lot to do with how easy it is to get the stars
off and on your paintbrush. If you have more water, it's going to be a lot
easier for the paint to come off and if you
don't have enough water, you're going to have
to really pound on the paintbrush to get
any to flick off. Those are my two
cents about stars, and then I like to have a little shooting star
on my night skies. For that, I like to use often a gel pen instead
of a paintbrush. I just flick my gel
pen out like that to create a little shooting
star across the sky. Now, let's talk about trees. For my trees, I'm using
the color lamp black, and I'm just going to
paint a few clumps. I generally, the way
that I paint trees, especially these little loose
pine trees is by painting a thin trunk and just these loose brushy
blobs on either side. I have a few classes on
different kinds of trees so if you're interested in
learning more about trees, then definitely check out some of my other
classes but for now, I'm just going to
paint these trees. But the thing for
this specific class, for the night sky class is I don't really like to paint them all the way
across the bottom. That's a preferential thing. I like to instead paint them in two or three clumps
along the bottom. When I'm done painting clumps, I make sure that the trees are different heights
and different widths. Some of them can be
bigger widths like this, just because the
variety there makes it more pleasing to
the eye, I think. I like to paint one clump on one side and then another
clump on another side. Usually on this side, it doesn't really matter, but I like to have like
one fairly tall tree and then I also like to have to create
depth in the piece, a few really tiny trees, not because a very tall tree would be next to a
really tiny tree, but because the size
is going to help your mind instead of looking at just one
static tree line, you're looking down into
a valley or faraway to trees that are at a distance. That's one trick when you're painting in
silhouettes because you can't use color value or
anything else to mimic depth is to use size. I like to paint just like
three clumps, sometimes two, but often three clumps of trees and the clump in
the middle often has the smallest trees
that sometimes are just even little dots. Just like that. By painting
these dots and varying sizes, you can create a lot of depth using very
simple techniques. [NOISE] That wraps it up for project Number 1 of our gradient night
sky watercolor class. This is my classic take on a night sky and I
hope you like it. Now let's move on to
project Number 2.
9. twilight night sky tutorial: Welcome to Project Number 2. For this project,
we are going to do a multichrome night sky. The effect is going to
be a purple that's kind of fading into an
orangey yellow. But the colors that I'm
using are gold ocher, these are all Winsor & Newton. Gold ocher, perylene
violet, and Payne's gray. I'm going to start
with a wash of perylene violet that goes at the top and stops
about right here, and then gold ocher is going
to come up from the bottom, and then I'm going to
put some Payne's gray at the top of that
perylene violet layer to make it a little darker. Let's go ahead and
get that started. First, like always, I'm going to start with
a wash of clean water, then I'm going to take
some perylene violet. Let me just turn my palette so you can see a little better. Take some perylene
violet and from the top go edge to edge, all the way down. If you don't have
enough water on your paper or on
your paintbrush, it's not going to be quite
as smooth of a blend. I'm not going quite
all the way down. I went a little bit farther
down than I intended, but I think it'll be okay. You're going to stop about
here when you do yours. More perylene violet
from the top and making a smooth gradient down about
two-thirds of the way down. Then I'm going
from bottom to top again just to make it
a little smoother. Now, I'm going to wash
off my paintbrush, pick up some gold ocher. For this portion, we want to make sure that the gold ocher is darker at the bottom and then gets light toward the middle. We want some whitespace
to show through, just to give it a little bit of contrast for when we paint
the silhouette on top of it. I'm just going back and forth between these two
sections like we did in the monochrome gradient
practice video to create a subtle gradient. I'm going to pick up a
little bit more gold ocher. Gold ocher is just like
a golden orange really. I think that that
is probably good. Notice how I'm not trying to make sure that
it's a smooth gradient. I'm okay if there's a
little bit of texture in here for this particular piece. Now I'm going to take
more perylene violet starting from the top again and making sure that my
paintbrush is pretty watery because as I was doing the
gold ocher at the bottom, the paper may have
dried a little, and so I want to make
sure that I have plenty of water on my brush
as I'm painting down. But I don't want to get too
close to the gold ocher with my highly pigmented
perylene violet because I want these colors to
blend at their lightest. One way to blend two
colors that might not look great together,
blended outright, one way to avoid a muddy
mess of a blend is to almost use white
as a buffer section. If you blend into the white
of the paper on both ends, then you can use watery pigments on both sides to
blend the two colors together so it almost
looks like there is this zone where the two
are blended together, which creates this
subtle gradient between two colors
that might not necessarily blend well if you
just blend them outright. That's one trick that I
like to use for that. Now I'm going to
take some Payne's gray and start it
just at the top of the perylene violet and Payne's gray mix with perylene violet
creates more of like a blue violet color that looks more like
we're dealing with an actual night sky as
opposed to a sunset. Right now, the
colors as they stand could feasibly look more like
a sunset than a night sky. But that's why I'm adding
the Payne's gray at the top, blending it right together while the perylene violet is still wet to create this gradient. From the top of the sky that
goes blue to purple and change the perylene
violet to be more of a blue violet color that's probably more akin to what a
night sky would look like. I'm going back and forth between blending in more Payne's gray, washing off my paintbrush and then blending it
from the bottom up. [NOISE] I want to make sure to wash off my
paintbrush so I don't get any of this super dark pigment
by my gold ocher because I want that gold ocher
at the bottom to give a subtle glow behind the silhouette that we are eventually going to paint there. I'm going to finish this up and then we'll paint
the silhouettes. Now that we've finished the sky, splattered on some stars, I'm going to switch
it up a little bit, and instead of just one
shooting star across here, I'm going to do three. Just to have a little
meteor shower. I think those can be fun. One thing that I do, if I draw multiple subjects, I always like to try
to do odd numbers. I don't know why I
think that I've read somewhere the odd numbers are
more pleasing to the eye, but it could also just
be preferential thing. There are my three
shooting stars, and now for the
subject on this piece, I'm going to paint a little sloping mountain side that has some trees
on top of it. I'm going to use some heavy pigmented
Payne's gray for that, and I'm just going
to go right on top of this gold ocher here. Leave enough of the gold ocher peeping out from the top of
the mountain side so that it looks like there's this subtle glow from the sun that it has
just barely gone. Some dark Payne's gray
right on top here. [NOISE] Then while
this is still wet, I'm going to take
my small paintbrush and just paint some trees right along the mountain ridge. The way that I paint these mountain ridge trees
is by painting a bunch of tiny little trunks
first of varying sizes, like I've talked about before. Then I'm going to go
through the trunks and paint lines across them
to turn them into trees. Just like this. It doesn't have to be perfect. They can be messy. I just want to make
sure more than anything that they blend
down to the bottom of the mountain ridge so
there's not any awkward spots. I want the trees to essentially cover the whole mountain ridge. Instead of like a
sloping mountain where you can see
the actual hill. All you see are these trees. One tip with trees, especially in this style, is when you're painting with the lines to make some
of them look wild and crazy like they're going
every which way because that is what is
going to make them look more realistic,
believe it or not. Trees are sometimes super ugly and they have
sticks that are just jutting out everywhere. That's my trick to making these loose pines look
realistic and to add some easy texture to a silhouette like this
is to make some of these lines jut out
so that you can see these crazy
lines individually. It's going to make the
silhouette look extra cool. There we have it. Final
Project Number 2. We did a night sky starting with a wash of perylene violet and then going into
this gold ocher. So you have a nice
little twilight glow here and then topped off the
gradient with some Payne's gray so we have a nice
smooth gradient from blue to violet all the way
down to gold of the sun. Then this fun little mountain
ridge tree line silhouette with a few shooting stars. I think this one
looks super cool. Now on to Project Number 3.
10. textured night sky tutorial: Welcome to the night
sky project number 3. For this night sky, I'm going to use
phthalo turquoise. This is Winsor and Newton phthalo turquoise and
also Payne's gray. We're going to start with a
wash of phthalo turquoise, just like it's a monochrome phthalo turquoise
and then to make the top a little bit darker
and a little bit more blue, we're going to add
some Payne's gray. Similar to in the final
project number 2, where we added Payne's
gray to perylene violet. That's one of my tricks, if I'm ever using a different
color for the night sky, but I still want
to get that dark almost black and blue
look at the top, then I just do some
heavy pigmented to Payne's gray a little bit and blend it in
right at the top. Let's get started. We are going to start with
a wash of clean water, just like all of the
other night skies. Now, let's put our wash of phthalo turquoise
starting from the top and going down
from edge to edge, just like we've done in all
of the other night skies, except this time we are going
to go all the way down. Basically, we're going to start with a monochrome gradient of phthalo turquoise because the light bluish green
of phthalo turquoise is what we're going to use for
the light part down below. Just like that. Then another, just to get a little bit
more pigment on here. Start with some more
phthalo turquoise at the top going all the way down and then I'm going to purposefully create just a
little bit of texture by, instead of using my brush
flat going all the way down, I'm going to take some pigment, start at the top and just do a little zigzag to create some lines of white on purpose all
the way through. I'm just making a little
zigzag motion, just like that. Now, I'm going to put my
Payne's gray right at the top, and probably do a few washes of this Payne's gray to
make the top pretty dark. As I'm putting this
Payne's gray on, I'm going to keep
doing those zigzag motions at an angle
just like this to create even more texture
in this night sky, but not go too far
down with the Payne's gray because I still want
the bottom part to be light. I don't want the Payne's gray, which I know is very dark, to go all the way
down to the bottom. I only want it to go
a little bit down. Then once I have enough Payne's gray and
phthalo turquoise, then I'm going to clean off
my brush and do those zigzag motions starting from
the bottom as well. There's a little
bit more of Payne's gray and now I'm going to get some more phthalo turquoise
and just keep with the zigzag motion all the
way down back and forth. Now, I'm cleaning off my brush. With clean water I'm going to do those zigzag
motion starting from the bottom with our
gradient techniques just to smooth out
some of the sections, this light section and
this other zigzag section. Just to smooth
everything out so that there's not quite so
stark difference. We have this textured
gradient going on with the colors intermixing, but we still want a smooth transition,
that doesn't change. Now, we've splattered
on the stars. Instead of doing a
shooting star this time, I'm going to do just a
little twinkling star, just wet on dry. I have a few
different methods for twinkling stars,
but for this one, I'm just basically going to do a tiny cross in the
corner right here. The way to do that without
getting too thick lines, because I find that that's usually my downfall if
I have too thick ones, is when you pick up
your paint right here, just slightly brush it against your palette or in this
case the inside of my lid to take off any excess without taking
off all of the paint. I'm just giving it a few brushes because I want the tip of my paintbrush to be very pointy. Now very carefully,
I'm going to put just my tiny cross right up here using
very little pressure. I'm barely even touching the paper, very little pressure. I'm going to extend
it a little bit further down here and then I'm going to do longer up
top and shorter across. That is just my
little cross that I'm going to do and maybe again, I like to work in threes. Maybe I do one more
tiny one right here but using very
little pressure, just a tiny little
cross right there, and then one more right here. Thin lines. When I find I do these crosses
with thick lines, I don't like them as much, so I try to do as
thin as possible. There are my stars, I've finished my stars and now let's move on to the silhouette. For this silhouette,
I'm just going to do a little layer of a
silhouette mountain. Instead of using my
small brush like I've done for most of the
other silhouettes, I'm going to take some lamp black with my number 10 brush. You can't see it because
I'm off to the side. But I'm going to take my lamp black with my number 10 brush. Starting down in the
bottom corner right here, I'm just going to move my
brush using the side of it upward and I'm moving my wrist just slightly so that I can get these crags that
are in our rock. So I don't want it to be
very smooth and sloping. I just want to be a little bumpy and then I'm
going to move up like this so that it's like a mountain peak and then
back down just like that. Then I'm just going to
fill this in with black. Here is our final
project number 3, where we did a
little bit more of a textured night sky and we
did some twinkling stars over here instead of a shooting star and then
for the silhouette, just this plane
stark mountain peak. Once again, using that simple night sky
landscape technique where we decided which subjects and
which variations to use. Even though every step
was pretty simple, I think this looks
very beautiful, so I'm pretty happy with it. Now onto the final project [LAUGHTER] of this class,
final project number.4
11. galaxy night sky tutorial: Welcome to the final project
for my night sky class. For our last night sky, I decided to use this fun
circular watercolor block. It's a watercolor block, meaning it has multiple
pages all glued together, and this is Magnani 1404. It's Italian, I ordered
it from Blick.com. That's the paper
we're going to use. This night sky is going
to be multicolored. Honestly, it's going to be
like a galaxy ask night sky. I let this would be a fun
way to end our class. The colors that I'm
mostly going to use color wise are this Daniel Smith, Quinn purple, Winsor, Newton, Phthalo turquoise, and
cenelia Quinn red. These are the colors
that I'm using, a purple, blue, and a red. Then Payne's gray
to round it out and capture the top dark
edges of the night sky. We'll go from there. Let's
start with our wash of water. Now that we have the block wet, I'm going to start
with Quinn purple. Just toward the top
of the block up here. Quinn purple is like
this blue-purple, blue-violet, kind of color. Honestly, it's probably a
little more red violet, but it feels like it has
a cooler tone to it. Anyway, it's a cool color. I'm going to start with
some Quinn purple right at the top and then bring
some of that down. But instead of bringing
it all down like we did, like we've done with
the other gradients. I'm going to add some Quinn red right
in the middle there. Now, I'm going to take some Phthalo turquoise
and add it right there. I kind of messed up. I was supposed to
add the Quinn red after the Phthalo Turquoise. I'm adding some Phthalo
turquoise right in the middle here and blending it in. Now I'm going to add
the Quinn red right at the bottom, right there. These are my layers of color. I'm just going to add
more Quinn purple around the sides and see when it
blends right on the paper, the Quinn purple and honestly all the other colors turn
into a different color, which I think is a
really cool effect. I'm just going to add a
little more Quinn purple, but I'm not going
to go all the way down to the side because the silhouette of our night sky is going to be along
the bottom right here. Just going to go back and forth. It doesn't have to
be exactly even. The layers of color don't
have to match necessarily. That's what makes this a
little more of a galaxy than a straight gradient. It's definitely textured. We're looking for a
textured night sky with lots of colors. I'm just picking up the colors individually and adding them on. Now I'm going to take
clean off my brush, and with clean brush, just bring down this Quinn rose down to the bottom
of the block and blend it in with the
Quinn purple up here. It's okay if a little bit of
the purple comes down here, the key is to make sure
it's watery paint. We're not trying to get very
pigmented paint down here, because we're still maintaining the light to dark or dark to
light from top to bottom, because the light at the bottom of the painting
is what's going to, once we put the
silhouette on there, make the sky look like it's
glowing along the bottom. Then if you find any spots where maybe the
paint is pedaling, that's where it's a good
idea to get out your Q-tip, and just mop up the puddles because the puddles could drip, and generally, when
watercolor starts to puddle, it becomes a little unwieldy and not quite the effect
that you're looking for. This night sky because
it has all these colors. We're going to do the
night sky in two layers. This is the first layer. I'm going to let this dry, and then do a second layer of colors on here just to make
it a little more luminous, and make sure that we get the dark blue of the
Payne's gray along the top. Hold on just a sec. This is dry, and
I'm just going to add another wash
of water on top, and now I'm going to add
the same colors again. I'm going to start
with some Quinn purple just right on top. Because watercolor
is transparent when you do multiple layers, especially if you're doing
multiple layers with color, you can get really cool, complex from luminous
skies and luminous layers. That's one really
cool thing about the transparency of watercolor. I added some Quinn purple
right on top there, and now I'm going to add some of this Phthalo turquoise just
underneath the Quinn purple. I'm just moving my
paintbrush around, making sure to blend
in with the colors, and blend in with the water. Now, I'm going to get my Quinn red and
blend it in again, and blend that light and bring
it down just a little bit. I still want to keep the
bottom part white here. I want to keep the
white space of this painting down right there. Now to round out this painting, I'm going to take some
Payne's gray and just go around the edges of the sky, and adding the dark blue for
me is a big part of what makes this guy actually look
like this guy as opposed to two colorful wash of colors. The dark blue and then
eventually one-way splatter on the stars. Those two things are really
what pull it all together. In my mind. I'm not really going for a
smooth gradient here. I'm really looking for that more textured
blend of colors. I'm just tapping my paintbrush
all around to blend the colors together and
adding more colors. So I added the Payne's gray
around and now I'm just adding in Quinn purple
and some turquoise. So I can make sure that those
colors are represented. Even if only, I only see
flashes of them. That's okay. Last but not least, some more Quinn red over here. Now I'm going to take
a wash of water, clean brush, and just bring
some of this pigment down. Just to blend it in a
little bit downward. Making sure I'm doing that
with clean water so that I'm not pulling too
much pigment away. Then starting from the bottom
like we've done before, just make sure to blend it all together while still
keeping the bottom part, that light white space. I'm just moving
some of the pigment around, blending it altogether. Honestly, at this point, it's anybody's guess as to
when I'm going to be done? If you're painting
along with me, I think that this is probably
a decent place to stop. I'm going to let this dry
and paint on some stars. I splattered the stars, and I tried when
your splattering, you can't really
control where they go. But when I want to try to cover the whole of the
sky that I'm doing. I'm also just try to hold
the paintbrush over where I'm trying to splatter and sometimes I get it and
sometimes I don't. It really is just experimenting
and seeing where it goes. One thing to remember
about splattering is that the first tap is almost
always the most and heaviest. So that's where you
get the biggest stars. That's why I tried to
move my paintbrush around and make
sure the first tap is not always in the
same place otherwise, the same spots can have
the biggest stars. I tried to just move that around a little bit just
to even it out, and I usually do
somewhere between five and 10 taps
going back and forth, adding more paint until I have a sky full of
stars like this. I like to have lots and lots
of stars in my night sky. Now that we've
finished the stars, let's move on to the silhouette. For this silhouette, I'm going
to use lamp black again, and I'm going to do similar
to the mountain ridge. Not the mountain peak, but the ridge with a
bunch of trees on it. We're going to use
a similar technique where instead of just
painting the trees, we're going to first
paint just a little blob, I guess, of black, just to fill in the bottom here. But then we're going to paint bigger trees that
are going into this. Because we're doing a circle, the trees are going to all
point toward the center. it's I don't know if maybe a fish-eye view is what that is, I'm not up on all
of those film term, I don't know exactly what this perspective would be called, but it's not just going
to be like a flat. That's the fun of
using the circle, is that it doesn't have to
just be like a flat view. We're going to use a
circle to our advantage. I'm starting with
just this layer of black that rings around
the bottom of the circle, and as I'm painting, I'm going to remember to keep the some of this lighter
space as much as possible. Because remember our rule that the contrast between
light and dark is really what makes night skies look
really stunningly beautiful. I know I'm going to cover up some of this
white-space with my trees, but I'm going to try to
remember to keep some of it. I'm going to start
with one tree here. They don't have to be directly pointing necessarily
toward the middle. This one is going
to be a little bit angled as you can see, and they don't all have to be
exactly straight up either. That's something
important to remember. But it is good to keep, have some focal point. Just to keep the angle in mind, and I'm just my focal
point is just the center, it could be this star, one of these stars up here. For the most part, I'm
just trying to make the trees be tilted a little bit to keep that
angle and that focal point. I'm just going to paint these in real time if that's
helpful for you. You might hear my son
in the background. I'm using my small size zero brush and just
painting right into the black that we painted first. That's one of the
reasons why I like to paint this black part first. So I don't have to worry about filling in
all the black space. The dark space along the
bottom with the tree. I can just have that black
part finish the tree, or let's finish the mountain or whatever else it's
supposed to be. Typically, when you're painting these round
perspective paintings, one tree should stand in the center and that's
what this tree is doing. I'm painting at a little bit
of an angle, but ultimately. It's always trial and error, I'm a self-taught artist, and the most important thing
to remember is to keep them mostly turning around in this circle to keep
this perspective. Again, they don't have to all keep exactly the same angle. I think that things in
nature are imperfect. When you're trying to get
different perspectives, those should also be relatively imperfect if you want to
keep it as real as possible. If you find that your painting and it just doesn't
look quite right, remember that paintings like this aren't supposed
to be perfect. Because nothing in nature
is and that you can always try again
if you decide you didn't really like the way
that you did something, you can always try again, and experiment to see if there's a different way that you'd like to do it just
because you're taking my class and doing
things the way that I'm doing them doesn't mean that that's what's right for you. Because I'm self-taught,
I learned by watching other people
on the Internet, and a lot of these
techniques I'm teaching you now are techniques that I started to learn from other people and then
tweaked to fit my style. I'm a huge fan of learning how someone else does painting, and then experimenting
and letting yourself be imperfect enough so
that you can figure out what really works best for you. Keep that in mind as you take this class and any of
my other classes that I am definitely in favor of you testing out
different methods, and if mine aren't, what works best for you, then I'm glad that you have taken the time
to figure that out. As I was talking, I just did exactly what I've
been telling you to do, which is paint these trees and paint them different sizes, different widths,
different heights, but have them mostly painting relatively toward the center. If it's on this
side then have them pointing this way, and
if it's on this side, then have them pointing
the other way so that it hugs the circle and completes this
fish-eye zoom perspective that we've created, and that's really cool to create with this circular block. That concludes our final project
of my Night's Sky class. For this project, I decided not to do any shooting
stars because I think it looks really cool just
with this giant sky of stars and colors and with the trees that circle around it. I think it looks great as is. But if you want to experiment and try
different things with these landscape recipes
that we have talked about, then you should
definitely feel free. That wraps up all of our
painting for this class. If you want to head on
over to the last video for the recap where
we look at all of the paintings and talk
about what we've learned. Then I do have a couple
of bonus videos at the end where you can learn some extra
things if you want. Thank you for joining me for this class and for
painting along with me. These night sky paintings are
near and dear to my heart. They mean so much to
me and I'm so glad that I get to share them
with you. Thank you so much.
12. bonus: tape tips + satisfying tape peels: This quick bonus video
is to show you how I take off tape from
my taped projects. Sometimes it can
be tricky and it depends on the quality of the paper you're using and the quality of the tape
that you're using. I always use masking
tape, or painter's tape, or washi tape, something
that is nice to paper. I always take the tape at
an angle and I move slowly. In case some of the
papers starts to catch, then I can move to
a different side. When I use Blick Professional
Watercolor paper, it hardly ever catches, which is one of the reason
I like using Blick so much. But if your paper does catch, let's pretend that it does. If it catches right here, if you notice some of the
paper coming up on the tape, then I would stop and start again from the other
side so that you don't end up peeling
the paper even more. To help prevent that and
to make untaping easier, I also put on the
tape a specific way. I always do top, bottom, side, side as opposed to top side, bottom side so that the tape
doesn't stick to each other. This way, if you do top, bottom, and then side, side, all the tapes are individually adhere as opposed to
sticking from end-to-end. That's my quick video on tape.
13. bonus: lettering on the sky: For this little bonus video, I'm going to do a
demonstration on how I use white gouache. This is Dr. Ph. Martin's
Bleed Proof White to do watercolor calligraphy on
night sky pieces like this. I pulled out a separate
night sky piece that I have done in the past and I'm just going
to letter right on this. The trick with using white
gouache and painting with gouache is to get it
liquid enough so that you can move your paint around so
it doesn't just get stuck, but not quite so liquidy
that it goes translucent. Right now, I like
to use the lid of my paint as a little palette
for this white gouache. I'm just going back and
forth between picking up some paint from the
bottle and then adding some water to it to get a nice little puddle of
paint that I can use. Just mix that until you have a pretty good consistency
where it's not paste, but it's not quite
super liquidy either. It's a thicker liquid. Now, I'm using my
Size 0 paintbrush. I'm going to take some of
that white gouache and just letter right on the sky. I'm going to letter
the phrase, dream on. Let me move this over here. Periodically, the
thing about lettering with or doing calligraphy with gouache or any paint is
that you frequently have to basically reload
your paintbrush or whatever it is you're using. You can also use a pointed pen. If you do pointed
pen calligraphy, I often do that on
these night sky pieces. That can usually work
if it's small enough. As you can see with some
of these lettering, I didn't quite use enough
paint in my ratio, so the paint started
to fade a little bit. That is for sure
the tricky part. You may need to like I just did, go over it again with
the paint to get it to be as white as you want. There's my little white
gouache calligraphy right on the sky. I'm just going to go over
some of these letters again with my paintbrush to get
them to be even more white. Be careful when you're
doing that because you could mess up the letters. My recommendation is to
just go slow when you're trying to get really
white lettering. You have to do multiple layers. If you use thicker gouache, like if you don't
have quite as much water in your mixture, then you can have more
stark white lettering, but it's a lot harder
to actually maneuver your paintbrush to
form the letters. The paint immediately comes off and goes texturing and scratchy. It's just a give-and-take. There you go. That's
my little bonus video of how I use white gouache and a paintbrush to do watercolor calligraphy on
these night sky pieces. Here's one last angle of that, and I hope you enjoyed
this bonus video.
14. recap: Thank you so much
for joining me for my Skillshare class on
watercolor night skies today. If you joined me for
the whole class, we painted this design, this circle night sky design and this night sky
twilight design, and this mountain
textured night sky, and then of course,
my classic Payne's gray night sky with a
shooting star at the top. If you painted along
with me and painted any of these designs or
any variation of them, please feel free to post
them to the project gallery. That is a great place where
you can communicate with other students and see what other students are working on, and it's a place
where I can provide you feedback for the
work that you've done. If you have any questions, make sure to drop them there. You can also feel free to
drop your questions as a discussion in the community
portion of this class. I make sure to check those and I will answer your
questions there as well. If you just love your painting so much that
you decide that you want to share it with your friends and family and you post
it to Instagram, I would love to see that. Please tag me, my handle
is this writing desk, and I will show you some love and you have a chance also to be featured in
my Instagram stories. Thank you once again for
joining me for this class. If you really liked this class, if you had a great time
and learned a lot, one way that you can
really help me is to leave a review about this class and share
it with your friends. I would love to share these techniques
with as many people as possible because
I love them so much. I think this is a great starter into the world of
watercolor landscape. Thank you again for joining
me and see you next time.
Kolbie Blume, Artist
