Watercolor Northern Lights

1. Intro: Hi, my name is Kolbie and I'm so excited that you're interested in joining me from my watercolor Northern Light Skillshare class. I've been a watercolor artist for about three years. One of my very favorite things is to teach myself how to learn something, especially so that I can teach it to other people. Watercolor Northern Lights was a subject that was no exception. I have always been fascinated with looking at the northern lights and trying to figure out how to capture them with paint. I have had some haphazard tries successfully over the past few years by really wanting to find a technique that I could easily teach to other people and that also looked really cool on paper. Finally, after a few months of really wrestling with it and experimenting, I think I found a couple of methods that work really well for my loose watercolor style. If you join me today, we're going to use two different methods to paint watercolor northern lights pieces that look like this one. This is the first project that we're going to do and this one. This is the second project that we're going to do. Now, my style of watercolor landscapes is more like Louis, quasi-realistic, but definitely has an artsy feel to it. If that sounds right up your alley, then I would love for you to join me for the rest of the class. I can't wait to see you there. 2. Materials: Before we get started, let's go over all of the materials that I'm going to be using today and that I recommend you gather as well. You don't have to use the same materials that I'm using, but I find it can be helpful to know what I am using in case you want to replicate that and also choose the colors that will optimize success for these projects we're going to do today. First, since we started talking about the colors, let's go over paint. I am a firm believer that you can make beautiful things with whatever you have on hand. If you only have like cheapo student grade paint at home, no worries. With these techniques, you should still be able to paint some beautiful things. That said, the professional stuff really is leaps and bounds better than student grade. Today I'm going to be using Daniel Smith Extra Fine Watercolors. They are some of my very favorites. Then also Winsor & Newton Professional Watercolors. I have four colors in Daniel Smith. Phthalo yellow green, which is going to help us get that really bright green that the Northern lights often appear as. Then I'm also using phthalo turquoise to go along with the green and opera pink. I'm going to mix a little bit with the other colors to create that purplish pink color that sometimes auroras looked like also. Then Payne's gray. Winsor & Newton Payne's gray is my favorite and it's a great color for night skies. Payne's gray is what I'm using. Then a lamp black for some of the silhouettes that we'll be painting at the end. Then I'm using a little bit of Dr. Ph. Martin's bleed proof white stars, for Northern lights don't often appear super bright. I'm going to show you how to make some dull looking stars with bleed proof white. But if you don't have this, white gouache would also work or a white gel pen or something like that. That's the paint. Next paint brushes. I am using this Princeton Neptune size 10 paintbrush. These paint brushes are really good. These Neptune series is really good if you're looking for a synthetic sable hair brush, a brush that really does mimic the effect of real sable hair without actually using a sable hair brush. I really like the Neptune series for that. You can recognize it by this nice like cherry wood handle. That's a size 10. Then I'm using a Princeton Glacier series size 6, and also a round size 0 and this is Utrecht sable series. All of these brushes are synthetic sable hair, which in addition to being cruelty free, I actually prefer synthetic sable hair to real sable hair because I think that it's easier to control water with them. Those are my paint brushes that I'm using today. Paper. For practice I always like to use student grade paper because it's cheaper, so I'm using Canson XL today. Always 140 pounds, just so that you can have some nice thick paper and then for our final projects, I'm using this Blick premier cold press watercolor block. For final projects, I always use professional watercolor paper, which is made of 100 percent cotton, acid free, archival and it's just made of better materials and made with a better process so that it makes your colors more vibrant and it helps withstand the test of time. The difference is, it's a little bit more expensive than student grade. So that's why I always have both when I do these classes. Then last but not least, I have two cups of water off to the side. One to keep clean always, which is actually going to be really important for Northern lights. In order for our Northern lights to really shine, water is going to play an important part, so we want to have clean water, not muddied water for that. I have two cups of clean water off to the side, one to stay dirty and want to keep clean. If you don't have a palette like this with your colors on it, then just make sure you have some place to mix things. This is a nice little round ceramic palette that I like to use. Then I have some Q-tips in case I need to mop up some extra puddly things and a paper towel off to the side. That wraps up materials that we're going to be using for this class. So paper, paint, paint brushes, this is what I'm using, but don't feel like if you don't have this, then you can't do this class. You should use whatever you have on hand and I'm sure you are going to make something beautiful. With that, let's move on to the warm-up videos. 3. Warm Up: Color Mixing: Before we even start painting, I like to prep my scenes wherever scenes I'm doing by testing out the colors that I'm going to be using before I use it on the final piece, and that's especially important for this Northern Lights class because I think that getting the color exactly arrived for Northern Lights can be tricky. Let's test things out. Like I mentioned before, I'm using all of these color paints today. But if you don't have this phthalo yellow green, you can make your own by mixing together like lemon yellow with hookers green, or probably even lemon yellow with turquoise green. We'll test out a bunch of different things today in this video. While you're watching, I recommend you do the same to test out what colors that you want to be using today. First of all, let's take a look at what this phthalo yellow green looks like, just in general. I have some of it on my palette right here. It's this bright light yellow, green. That really is exactly what we're looking for in terms our Northern Lights, in my opinion. Let's see what happens when we mix some lemon yellow. If you don't have this, if we mix some lemon yellow, and by the way, when you're mixing yellow with things, typically you need a lot more yellow than you need the other thing. That's just because the range of yellow is pretty small. Range meaning how light or dark it can go, in terms of color volume. This is hooker's green I have, which is just like a typical normal green. I'm mixing that together, and notice how I used a ton of yellow it felt like, and it's still not quite as green as this phthalo yellow green is. I'm going to grab a bunch more lemon yellow. You need a lot of lemon yellow to mix with whatever green you have, in order to make it this bright green that we're going for. Added a bunch. That's more along the lines of it. If this is how you can create yellow-green, then you should definitely go for it. You don't need to buy every color under the sun in order to make the colors that you need. You just need to know a little bit about color theory and color mixing, and that will go a long way. We need this bright green, and we also need a pinkish purple to go along with the other color that the Northern Lights often are. In order to get that pinkish purple, I'm mixing opera pink, putting a bunch of opera pink. Just in general, when you're mixing colors, if one of the colors is a light color like opera pink and lemon yellow, you probably need more of the lighter color than you do of the darker color, because darker colors often have a wider range in terms of color value than lighter colors. That's just a tidbit of information for you. I have this opera pink. This actually an experiment for me. I'm going to try mixing it with a little bit of phthalo turquoise and see what the result is. I really love mixing phthalo turquoise with things, because it's this really cool combination of blue and green. It makes them really cool color combos. I mixed a tiny bit of phthalo turquoise, and that's not quite the purple, that's a little bit too purple. I'm just going to add in some more opera pink here. See if I can get it. Yeah, so it is more like this color is what we're looking for. Like if you are mixing red and blue together, and this I think would be classified more as red violet, so you're looking on from a warmer side of the mixture of opera pink with whatever color you're mixing it with. You can do with phthalo turquoise like I'm using. You can also makes opera pink with Prussian blue is a good way to get a color with just a tiny bit of Prussian blue, which is just like a normal your everyday blue. I have a tiny bit of Prussian blue and mixing it with opera pink. Once again, you need a lot more opera pink than you do whatever other color you're mixing it for with. That gets pretty similar results. That's good to know, but because I'm using phthalo turquoise already in my piece, which I'm going to use it as like a buffer to help the green Northern Lights shine and we'll show you that later in the class, I just mixed a lot of opera pink with a little bit of phthalo turquoise to make it not quite so bright. In case you don't know, opera pink is just like super bright hot pink pretty much. But I really like having it in my color palette for mixing mostly because typically to get pink, you would take a lighter color value of red. But I think that this pink, like this light red, there's only so much you can do with it. The brightness of this pigment in opera pink, I can't find it by mixing any other colors. I really like having opera pink in my color palette for that reason. These are the colors we're using, and then just to show you once again, all of the colors, here is phthalo turquoise that's like a light value phthalo turquoise. Then here is Winsor and Newton's Payne's gray. For the record, if you are only using Daniel Smith, this is something that I found out and it's really interesting. Daniel Smith, there blue line of colors is quite a bit darker than Winsor and Newtons. So if you have Daniel Smith Payne's gray, it looks more grayish black, than Winsor and Newton's Payne's gray. Winsor and Newton's Payne's gray looks like this dark navy, and this dark navy is more like Daniel Smith's indigo. Just a little tidbit of information for you there. But this is the color palette that we're going to be using today. Some lamp black Payne's gray, this purply pinkish color, yellow, green, phthalo, turquoise. It's going to be really pretty and really fun. Before you move on, why don't you mix together your colors and gather all the colors that you're going to use and let's keep practicing. 4. Warm Up: The Wet-on-Wet Technique: Next, let's practice watercolor techniques. There are two basic watercolor techniques, there's the wet-on-wet technique and the wet-on-dry technique. The wet-on-dry technique is basically when you paint on paper that's already dry. When we paint our scene on top of the Northern lights with the trees, then that will be using the wet-on-dry technique. But for most of painting the actual Northern lights, we're going to be using the wet-on-wet technique. Just to give you a basic demonstration, the wet-on-wet technique is, if you don't already know, is when you paint on a surface that's already wet. That could be wet with water, like I'm doing right now, I just grabbed some water and put it on this paper, or it can be wet with paint. But either way, the surface that you are painting on is already wet so that the watercolor blooms out like that. The amount that it blooms often depends on how much water you have, which is something we're going to keep talking about in this video, and the pigment that you have, different pigments react differently with water, so I'd always recommend testing out the colors that you're going to use before you actually start using them. [NOISE] There are a lot of factors that go into the wet-on-wet technique and we're going to go over some of them in this video. This is what happens when instead of being very defined, just as an example, the wet-on-dry technique is more like when you paint lines like that. The paint only goes where your paintbrush goes because watercolor paint wants to move where there's water, because it's activated with water. By putting water or putting wetness on the paper, then it allows the paint to move freely around depending on how much water is on the paper and how fluid your pigment is. One thing to note is, when using the wet-on-wet technique, we're definitely going to want some watery pieces, where the pigment's going to move more freely. The more water you have, the more the pigment moves all over the place on the paper. But if you have too much water, if it's so wet that you can see a puddle on top of your paper, then let me show you what happens. Instead of the paint blooming or exploding on to the paper like I did before, like if I'm purposefully putting a puddle on my paper like that, then instead of blooming on the paper, the paint just sits there. Do you see? Here, let me move up the paper so that you can see a little bit better. I have this puddle here, and instead of moving on the paper, the paint is moving in the water, and that is no good for a painting. We have zero control, and it's not really painting, it's just sitting there. We don't want puddles when we paint with watercolor, but sometimes they are inevitable. If you do have a puddle on your paper or too much water, you'll notice that your paint isn't really going anywhere. That's why I recommend having Q-tips on hand. As you can see, I've mopped up the excess water on here, and almost all the pigment is gone. That's another indication that I had too much water, the pigment wasn't touching the paper, it was just in the water, so when I mopped up the water, all the pigment is gone. We don't want puddles, but with this Northern lights piece, we are going to be working with varying amounts of wetness on our paper. One other thing I will note is that you might have different results on your student grade paper than on your professional grade paper because student grade paper, based on what it's made of, tends to dry a lot faster than professional grade paper. That's just something to keep in mind as we continue with this practice session. Continuing on, we are going to vary between really wet surfaces, really wet meaning the water's going to move freely on your paper without many places to stop, like this, and you usually can only get this result where it's moving basically anywhere you just put water, if you paint pretty much immediately after you wet down your paper. We want this to get some wide swatches and also to help show the transparency of the watercolor that we're using. [NOISE] By putting a lot of color in one place and having a really wet surface, and even by adding more water to it, you see how I'm continuing as I'm speaking, I'm adding more water to this so that you can see more of the paper underneath it, so that there are more of these white translucent spots underneath the paint that we just put down. Making these translucent spots is how we're going to make our Northern lights shine on the paper. Practicing painting with a bunch of water on your paper is going to be really important, and so you want to practice putting a lot of water on it first so that the paint can move around and make its own watercolor texture, but then you also want to practice rinsing off your paint brush and using clean water to tap onto the surface, onto whatever color you're using as a way to almost reveal the white paper underneath. In this video, we're really just practicing the wet-on-wet technique, and in the next videos, we're going to practice these techniques with the actual Northern lights colors, and I'll show you how to make them look like the Northern lights. But for now, just practice with the amount of wetness. Also, before we end this video, I want you to practice too what happens when you paint on a surface that is wet but not quite as wet as before. Usually, if you know that you want a blurry subject, but you don't want it to be totally unrecognizable, you want to have some control, then you want your paper to be damp, but not quite wet. My trick for that is to paint on the paper and then wait like 30 seconds or maybe a minute, and wait for it to dry a little bit, and then start painting. That way, you can get more defined shapes that are just a little bit blurry. See how when I paint these lines on here, I still have those blurry edges, so it's still blending in with my paper, it's not a defined line like it would be up here. But it's also not over here, where when I put the paint down, it exploded everywhere, and now there's no recognizable shape, it's just a big wash of color. The difference between these two is how much water was on the paper. Meaning, I painted on this swatch while there was still a lot of water before it dried, and I waited about 30 seconds before painting on this one so that I could have a little bit more definition in my blurry subjects. I want you to practice having different amounts of wetness on your paper and what happens, and how defined you can get your subjects to be in already wet paper, and how you can get colors to blend together and reveal the white underneath of the paper depending on how much water you put in. I want you to practice all of that, and because it's a wet-on-wet technique, it's going to be very important for the rest of this class. With that, I will see you in the next video. 5. Practice: Method 1: Now that we have practiced colors and mixing colors and also different variations of the wet-on-wet technique, let's go ahead and put those skills to use and practice the first method of painting Northern Lights. This is the easiest one and that's why we're starting out with it. First, I start out like how I paint basically every night sky. If you've taken any of my wilderness classes or my sky classes, I usually start out with a wet piece of paper. I wet it with water first, with clean water. Then we're going to take some of that light green. I am using this tallow yellow green. We want varying values for sure. If you have it dried on a palette like I do, instead of taking it straight from the palette, I'm going to put it on a mixing palette and mix some water in with it first. Then while my paper is still wet, my paper dried a little bit here as you can see, that's the trouble with using student-grade paper. I'm going to just wet it a little bit. Good thing this is only practice. I'm going to re-wet this piece of paper around where I've painted because I don't want to get the whole thing green. Just a little bit more. That's one trick that [BACKGROUND] I wasn't intending on talking about here. Don't mind if you hear my son in the background, just chatting away. If you ever have an area on your paper that dried before you wanted it to, but you want the paint that you already painted to stay where it is, you don't want to just put the paint everywhere, you start with the paper that's clean and dry first and start with your wet paint, and then you move the water to meet the wet paper. That way you don't have any dried paint lines like I did up here. I had paint here and it stopped because the paper was dry. I started where the paper was dry [BACKGROUND] and then I just moved the water toward the paint so that, that way the paint stays where it is, [BACKGROUND] but it also blends in with the paper so I don't have any dried paint lines. That's my little trick there. Back to our scheduled programming. I'm using my number 10 Princeton Neptune brush here. I'm taking this lighter-ish color value. Starting from the bottom, I'm just painting upward and flicking it upward. Basically, I want my Northern Lights to stay down here. Then once I have the Northern Lights down, put a little bit more, I am going to [BACKGROUND] pick up some of my Payne's gray and just put it right on top here. This is the first method we're using because it's pretty easy. You can do it all in one layer though. I will say, for light and things that you want to have shine in watercolors, sometimes it can be nice to do multiple layers , but we'll talk about that. Anyway, I am just painting the night sky right on top. In-between the Northern Lights and the night sky, I do want to have a little bit of an in-between watery place because I want the Northern Lights to look like they're shining, I don't want them to just be stark against the sky. The way to make them look like they're shining is to have [BACKGROUND] a little bit of whitespace in-between the Northern Lights and the sky. But because I don't want it to be just pure white, I'm going to use an in-between color, which is this fallow turquoise right here. I have a little bit of this fallow turquoise on my palette already. I'm going to use a light color value, so I'm adding a lot of water to it. My son is wanting to join in our activities, so if you can hear him, hope you don't mind listening to a six-month old. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, I'm putting in this fallow turquoise, just this buffer in-between the night sky and the Northern Lights. Then I'm going to take my brush [BACKGROUND] in just a minute. I'm washing off all the pigment of my brush, and also taking off much of the water. I don't want it to be a super wet brush because there's already plenty of water on here. [BACKGROUND] But I'm just going to manually using an up and down motion like this, I'm going to manually blend these layers together. I'm using the up and down motion because that's usually the shape that the Northern Lights takes in the sky. Now that I did that [BACKGROUND] with the green and the fallow turquoise, I'm going to do the same with the blue and the fallow turquoise. There you have it. That is layer 1. If you really want the colors to be vibrant and have a little bit more show through, then I [BACKGROUND] would let this dry and basically do it all over again. Then you have two layers of colors showing up. If you do two layers, it's always helpful to have one be a little bit lighter because that way you have more of the paper and transparency of one layer able to show through the next. When we do our final project using this method, I'll probably do multiple layers just to show you what that looks like. But for now, that's the basic practice. What we did, just to recap, is we got this paper wet. We started with a light value of this green. Sorry for my son whining in the background a little bit. We started with this light fallow yellow green, and then we put in the blue of the night sky, and then we blended those two together with a light fallow turquoise, and then used a clean brush to manually blend them together in this up and down motion. That is method 1 of Northern Lights. Very simple. It's totally doable. I bet you can do it. Go ahead and practice this and then we'll move on to method number 2. 6. Practice: Method 2: Now, we are on to practice Method 2. In the previous video, we practiced painting northern lights in this really simple design basically with just the night sky on top and the light's coming up from the bottom, and then the idea is once this is dry, then you paint whatever subjects in a silhouette along the bottom like a lot of the other classes that I have. In my night sky class is the first one that immediately comes to mind, that's how you finish the pieces just by painting some black trees along the bottom here. That's Method 1, it's the most simple method, and Method 2 is just a little more advanced and a little more tricky. It's still doable, still I think, for beginners, but it's just a little trickier. Let's practice. First things first, once again, we are getting our paper wet. I'm practicing on student-grade paper, I like to use honestly pieces of scrap paper sometimes for practice so I'm just practicing on this little piece of paper. I'm getting the painting area wet and first I'm going to put in the night sky at the top. Last time we did the northern lights first and put in the night sky after and this time, we're going to put in the night sky first, and I'm doing that so that I can have a little bit more control over where the night sky goes. Honestly, the order doesn't really matter that much on any of these. The trick is to just make sure you know where your paint is going. The reason that I want a little bit more control over where this Payne's gray for my night sky is going is because the northern lights that I'm going to put in in just a second we're going to make a little design out of them, as opposed to having them just coming up out from the bottom, this time we're going to put them more in a specific design in the sky. What I'm doing with the Payne' gray right now is I am putting it along the bottom and along the top, and then we're going to have the Northern Lights be in a wave-like this because that's often how you see them. I'm just re-wetting my paper right now because first of all, student grade paper dries a lot faster than professional-grade, so during practice, you might have to re-wet a few times. Now, I'm just putting in a light layer of this Payne's gray along the bottom here. Now, like we talked about before, I don't want the blue to be so stark against the green and purple colors. We're going to use both colors in this one and that's because allowing the white space to show underneath really helps with the illusion that the lights are shining in the sky and we'll see that at the end here. I'm going to edit this part out because there's a vacuum going on in the background and I don't want that to be part of the video. Don't want that to be part of the video. Don't know how long it's going to last but I am going to re-wet this so that it stays wet. That's annoying, isn't it? Just a little annoying. Sounds like they're mostly gone. Continue playing again. Now that we've put the night sky on both the bottom and the top, first, I'm going to let it sit for a little bit because like we practiced with different wetnesses in the warm-up video for the wet-on-wet technique, we want our paper to be not so wet that the paint blooms outward everywhere. We want it to be slightly less wet so that we can control at least a little bit where our northern lights are going to go. Wait for just 30 seconds, if you're not sure, look at your paper at an angle. If you can see that the light is still reflecting off it, then it's still wet. if you can see that it's very bright and you can see puddles or whatever, then it's probably still a little too wet. You want to put down our paint when the paper it still reflects but it's not quite so bright, it's on its way to being a little bit more dull when the light is reflecting off of it. I think we're just about there. We're first going to use our light green. Once again, I'm going to put some of this phthalo yellow-green on my mixing palette here, and add some water so it's nice and watery and a lighter color value. Starting from the bottom, I'm going to just make a wave-like this because northern lights are often in a wave-like this. I'm going to make a wave like this and then from the bottom of the wave, push up the paint like this into the sky. You might have to rinse off your brush in-between because you see how when I was just going in a line, some of the Payne's gray, I pulled from the sky and it's painting into the lights. That's okay sometimes, but it's also good to rinse off your brush in between. We want the bottom to be really defined or pretty defined. then we want the top to be the lights shining up into the sky just like that. Now that we've painted the top, I'm just going to blend in the lights a little bit. I just have clean water on here, but you can also like we did in the previous video, take some of this phthalo turquoise, a light value of this phthalo turquoise, and use that color to blend the two colors, the Payne's gray and the phthalo yellow green. Always going in an up and down motion because typically that's how northern lights look when they're represented in the night sky. They have this vertical shape. That's part of what makes them so unique, is that they have a vertical shape represented in light and I just think that's really beautiful. Once you've done that, now, along the bottom, we're going to take our light pinkish purplish color and along the bottom of that green, I'm just going to add a little even more opera pink here along the bottom of that green while it's still wet, I'm going to add a little bit more water to my brush so that my pink is pretty light. We're just going to trace along the bottom here and outline the northern light we already had. I still want my bottom of this path of northern lights that I've created to be defined. It's almost like a mountain peak when you look at it or like a mountain ridge that I've created a mountain shape. I still want that part to be defined. But just like before, I'm just going to gently lift up, washing my brush off in-between because I do want that pink to show along the bottom. I'm just going to lightly blend these two colors together. You can continue using the purple-pink mixture to blend in a really light value, or you can just use water. That would be okay too. Using just water mostly would help the paper come through. A lot more white space of the paper come through, and that would give the light effect we're looking for also, so both of those methods would work. After this method of northern lights, we want there to be a defined pattern, like a squiggle in the sky where the northern lights are moving and dancing up and down, and then we want there to be some space like a buffer zone in-between the lights and the sky so that it looks like they're shining in the sky. If you have too much water, like so much water that the sky isn't quite shining through anymore, there we have two options here. Either we can let this dry and paint another layer with just the sky so that it blends into the northern lights. I'm going to demonstrate that more in our final project, or you can, while this is still wet very carefully just add more sky at the top. We don't want it to run into the lights. We don't want it to be super stark against the lights. We do want to have that light whitespace buffer zone in-between to show that there is some light going on in-between, but we do also want the dark of the sky underneath and around to show through because that is what helps provide contrast with the light and the light spaces in the sky, the contrast against the dark blue. I'm just going to add in some of this dark blue. This method is something we talked about briefly in a previous video where the paper underneath my northern lights dried, and so I want to add in the night sky underneath, but I don't want there to be any paint lines. I'm starting from the bottom, from the dry paper, and using clean water on my brush to gently meet the wet lights so that I can re-wet this part of the paper without having to completely mess up the shape and the design that I already created. That's a little trick that I have with re-wetting paper. I know that it looks like a big wet-on-wet mess, but you can still see some faint pink in here, and the lights look like it has a design to it. One last thing that you can do is with a clean brush, just add in some vertical lines and you can do it with a clean brush, or you can even do it with some light value of the green or the pink that you have. Start in the lights and just move up vertically to manually create that up and down, that vertical dancing pattern that the Aurora is known for. I would only do a few of these lines just in some select places. It's a really subtle move. It's going to add a really subtle texture, but it could be one of those little small details that makes all the difference. Moving from the light into the sky with either water or with a light color value of that green, you could even do pink moving up into the sky, but I'm just doing green for this one to demonstrate, will help to provide even more of that dancing vertical shining texture in the sky. This is our practice video. To recap, we got our paper wet and we painted the top and the bottom with our night sky colors first, and then while the paper was still wet, we took our green, a light color, phthalo yellow green, and made a squiggle of a design, so look like the lights were dancing in the sky. We started with that squiggle using the broad end of our brush, and then gently with more paint, moved some more of the green into the top of the night sky leaving the bottom squiggle defined. Then once we did that, we lined the bottom of that squiggle with the purple-pink combination and did some manual textures and manual blending, and here we are. Now we have a light. It's pretty light, but it definitely looks like some northern lights dancing in the night sky. I've talked about this before, but the way to get this brighter is to do another layer, do this all over again pretty much. That will help to make the layer turn out even brighter. I'm going to demonstrate that to you as we do our final projects. But for now, this is the practice method 2. It's a little more detailed, definitely has a few more steps to it, but I'm sure there are plenty more ways that you can create this more detailed, almost more realistic version of the northern lights. I don't know how it's still loose watercolor, which is my style, but like I said, I'm sure there are many methods for you to achieve this, but this is one that I've found to work most often is manipulating the water but still leaning into the wet-on-wet technique to let watercolor do its thing. That is method 2. Now we are going to move on to potential wilderness subjects that you can have to round out the northern lights. 7. Practice: Wilderness Elements #1: Welcome back. We have practiced our two methods for painting northern lights. One is this more simple, wet on wet wash and then the other was this a little bit more complex wet on wet wash with two different colors. Before we move on to our final projects, I'm going to practice with you potential wilderness subjects that you can put on your skies to round out your northern lights piece. First, we'll practice the subjects on this method one piece, and I think, pretty classic subject that I like to use. I really love to paint trees. I'm just going to paint some trees along the bottom of this line here of this painting here and show you what that looks like. I'm using lamp black, but one thing to note, you might be able to hear my son in the background. One thing to note is that you can [NOISE] also use Payne's gray in its most dense format like mostly paint and not nearly as much water Payne's gray is also a good substitute for black, that's one thing to note. For my trees, I could just do a pretty simple tree line. When I paint trees as a silhouette, I like to use black and I like to do them in clumps. If you would like to know how I paint my trees specifically, mostly I'm just putting some blobs on either side of this tree trunk. I will put this at an angle so you can see it a little bit better in just a second. But if you want to know how I paint my trees in a more detailed manner, I have other classes about this subject in my night sky class. Also I have a misty forest class where I go through a few different trees and then I have a loose pines class where I go through eight different loose trees. Now we're at a different, more side angles so that you can see these trees just a little bit better. I'm going to use my lamp black. I like to paint my trees when I do silhouettes, I like to paint them in clumps. I'll do like a clump of maybe five trees here and I like to do them in different sizes to show depth and complexity. I'm going to do a little tree here and then another little tree here. Then I think to round out this gorgeous, to add more complexity to this piece. I also do this when I compose where my subjects are going to go. I hardly ever think about it beforehand, I just start plopping things down and then I decide on the spot where I want to put them. I'm going to have another tree clump here. I was initially going to have a really tall tree be in the middle, but sometimes I even do just like dots to represent a tree line that's going down into a valley or something right down there. But I think I'm just going to have this clump here and call that good. That is my one method for placing a subject in front of your lights. I really like doing silhouettes in front of the northern lights because it shows a higher contrast against the lights, [NOISE] that's one method. While we're still on trees, I'm going to demonstrate another method that I also have been become a fan of recently. Instead of painting a tree like it's really far away, you could also paint a tree like it's really up-close, like almost as if it's framing the scene. I'm going to paint just like a single branch coming out of here. This is one method of painting trees that I have called the dotted method, which you can find in my loose pines class. I am of painting that specific branch. Instead of painting a whole tree, I'm basically just like painting the side of it or one branch that I can see that's going to act as a frame to the whole thing. [NOISE] Let's try that again on the other side over here. I'm going to use my smaller brush this time to make it maybe look a little more detailed. Maybe we're seeing a branch poking through down from this angle. This is a technique that we learned in my holiday wreath class painting more detailed pine branches like this. I'm just going to paint this little pine branch like it's jutting out from the top of the scene. I like my little pine branches to have arms or even a friend. Let's paint another little pine branch jutting out from your scene. This is just a different method you can use instead of that dotted more abstract effect over here. You can use this slightly more detailed, but still loose. [BACKGROUND] My son is coughing in the background. It's not like you're looking on a picture of the pine tree but the small detailed lines do make it look a little more realistic than the dots and the blobs of that method over there. But I think they both look cool. These are just some things that you can do with trees. One last thing [NOISE] that you can do [NOISE] that can be fun, is to, instead of as like another way to frame and have a silhouette, is to have like a whole tree taking up the frame and without even being able to see the pine needles. I was going to paint it honestly, the whole side of this painting, we're going to say that this is a tree trunk that we can see because it's just in our field of vision. I don't know that I would use all of these in one composition necessarily, [LAUGHTER] but all of these separately can be really cool tricks to add a subject to your sky that will make the sky pop, especially with these northern lights that we have here. Just showing you that again, we have the clumps of trees as a silhouette, which is a classic look. This is a look that I do a lot or we can have branches or a little branches hanging down, pine needles hanging down, poking out from the side. Or you can even just paint a long trunk that frames the scene as well. All these can add complexity and are really fun to paint and pretty simple. We're going to have one more video where I'm going to talk about other things that you can put in your scene. After that last video, then we're going to move on to our final projects. 8. Practice: Wilderness Elements #2: Okay. Before we move on to our final projects, I just wanted to show you a couple more things we can add, more subjects that we can add to our paintings to round out the landscape painting, and also emphasize the lights from the northern lights, we just painted in our skies. In the last video we painted a bunch of different kinds of trees, and now, I'm going to show you some mountains. I have this close-up slight angle view just so you can have a better look at what I'm doing. One thing we can do is add layered mountains, and the way that we do that is if you add two or even three layers of mountains, the thing that you need to remember is that the farther away the mountain layer is, the lighter it should be. That has to do with color value. To make the color lighter, you add more water to it. I'm going to take some indigo, or some Payne's gray, and with a light value, and just broadly with the broad enter my paintbrush, just paint an outline of a mountain. I'm going to paint that in. It's okay if some of the light shines through underneath it because oftentimes actually light and things in the sky like sunsets do reflect off of mountains. I think that there's a really cool part. Partly because of maybe there's snow reflecting off of it, or just one of those things out in nature and science that I can't clearly explain in words, but, they do. Sometimes lights do reflect off of mountains. That's like a far away distant mountain ridge, and we're going to let that dry. Okay, so our mountain layer is dry and now we're going to keep going with just a slightly darker mountain layer, slightly underneath it. It doesn't have to be the same. In fact, it should be a little different, and it doesn't have to only stay underneath the first one. I'm having this one just a little bit above because I actually really like it when foreground subjects jet above background subjects, I think that it adds some really cool complexity. There's that. I'm just painting in the mountains. That is one really cool way that you can add one cool subject that you can add to your northern lights piece to help showcase the shine, and showcase the cool lights of the sky, and make it look like a real landscape piece. These are all really simple techniques. None of this is wildly complicated. It's really just putting different layers of washes on top of each other. Those misty ethereal mountains are really fun way, and you can combine the mountains with the trees or do one or the other, or come up with something entirely your own that's unique. Either way, I think these will equip you to make some really cool and deceivingly simple night sky northern lights paintings. Now that we have painted the mountains, let's take our skills and move on to the final project. 9. Final Project #1: Part One: Now that we have practiced and learned some of the techniques. Let's put them into practice with our first final project using method number 1. Just to remind you, method number 1 is the Northern lights method that we used. That was only using that light yellow green and it was a pretty simple mixture. Let's go along with that simple design. First, wet down the area that you're going to be painting. I am using my Blick Art supply. From Blick Art supply, this is a premier watercolor block. It's 100 percent cotton watercolor paper. I mentioned this in the materials video. I buy a lot of these blocks. This is size seven by ten. You don't have to do this size. Obviously you can do whatever size you want. But this is a very common size that I use to paint my projects on. I'm just wetting down the whole paper. Like we practiced, we're going to paint a cloud of phthalo yellow green coming up from the bottom and using a light value, phthalo turquoise as a buffer between that and a nice Payne's gray sky. The nice thing about 100 percent cotton watercolor paper is it can usually stay wet a little longer then the student grade paper we were using. That is one reason to invest in professional supplies if you are interested in that. Like we did before, I'm just going to go ahead and start with the green and using my ceramic mixing palette here, which I also bought from Blick Art Supply, the store, just online. But Amazon also sells some pretty inexpensive ceramic mixing palettes if you are interested. One of the benefits of having a ceramic mixing palette is that it just provides a smoother surface for a blend. Sometimes when you get plastic mixing palettes, they are coated with some material that makes the paint dot and bubble instead of mix smoothly like this. A lot of people like these ceramic one's better. But they both work, I think. Starting from the bottom, I'm holding my brush and this really like light position. I'm not holding my brush very firmly. I'm just moving my paint up using a vertical movement and then maybe I'll use some water on my brush. I didn't pick up more pigment. I just picked up water so that I can move some of the paint around. Using water to move the paint around instead of just adding more paint is one way to add movement and texture to your piece. Especially when painting skies, I always recommend having clean water on hand so that you can blend in whatever colors you're working with in your sky very smoothly. I've laid down some of this phthalo yellow green. Now I'm going to pick up some phthalo turquoise and I'm going to get like a light color value like we talked about. In order to get a light color value, I need to add more water. I'm just going to like a vertical motion. I'm never going sideways for Northern lights, mostly because Northern lights move in this vertical motion. I'm moving in more of a vertical motion with my paintbrush still holding it pretty loosely, still making sure that my paper is wet. Now I'm going to pick up some Payne's gray. For the Payne's gray, I can move in this horizontal motion and just blend the blue down like that. Then in a second, I'm going to get some water and blend all of these layers together so that they are smooth and look like they're just dancing with each other. I want the top of my sky to be darker than the bottom part. But not super dark because Northern lights are in the sky, then it's a little bit brighter than it normally would be. Now I'm washing the pigment off of my paintbrush. I'm just going to blend in and using an awkward vertical motion like we talked about, blend in the turquoise with the blue. I'm going to also leave some white. You can see how as I'm doing this, without my even doing anything, the blue and the water are blending into each other. The Payne's gray and the water are blending into each other to make some vertical bleeding motions anyway. That's why I think watercolor is really fun to use to paint Northern lights because it does a lot of the work for you. Now, I'm going to do the same thing, but blending the green in with the phthalo turquoise so that I can still have some of this shining bleeding light coming down and into each other. You'll notice that when you use the 100 percent cotton watercolor paper also, the bleeds and the blends just look so much more smooth and you can usually make the paints do a little bit more of what you are hoping for, in my experience. But that said it's always good to practice on cheaper paper just in case you don't like what you've come up with. Anyway, there are pros and cons to using all different materials in my experience. As I'm chatting, I'm just going back and forth between picking up more pigment, whether that's that yellow-green pigment or some fallow turquoise pigment, and going in vertical motions, up and down, up and down. The key is that I never want there to be a really stark concentrated place where there's lots of color because Northern Lights, I mean, it's light. They're supposed to be light. That doesn't mean that they can't be bright, but I don't want it to look like there's like a dot of really heavy pigment anywhere. That's why water and learning how to control water is really important when painting Northern Lights because using the whitespace of the paper in conjunction with the texture that we're making with these lights is really crucial to making them look like they're lights dancing in the sky as opposed to something a little more tangible. I'm going to add a little more turquoise here. That's not to say that you can't use brighter pigment, like I said, I'm adding a little bit more pigment here, and then I'm also going to add a little bit more of the green underneath here. It can still be bright, you just don't want it to be heavily concentrated. That is going to require just a lot of experimentation, I think, with water control, and what happens when you use different amounts of pigment versus different amounts of water and as much as I feel like I can talk about my experiences until I'm blue in the face but it's not really going to sink in until you experiment yourself. Hopefully, watching me go back and forth is helpful for you, as you're painting your Northern Lights. Painting Northern Lights is really just practice and patience and I think practice and leaning into imperfection a little bit. Now I'm using these vertical strokes to just all the way across my Northern Lights painting, like what we practiced in Method 2, which we're going to practice more when we do our second final project that incorporates Method 2 but just adding those little textures can make all the difference when it comes to painting the elusive Northern Lights. At some point, you have to be done. I think I'm to finish my sky. That's what my sky is going to look like. If you finish yours and you decide it's not quite bright enough, then you can always do a second layer and I will show you what that looks like in just a quick minute. I'm going to let this dry and then I'll be back before you know it. Our second layer is dry. After our second layer, we still have some nice muted colors, but they're just a little bit brighter. Now, I want to talk about adding stars. Adding stars with Northern Lights paintings isn't just your typical splatter on some white stars like I talk about in some of my other classes and that's because Northern lights are supposed to be like a light on top of the sky. When you look at pictures, the stars are actually looking like they're underneath the lights as opposed to on top of them. What that basically means in terms of what we're doing is that the stars are a little more dull, they're not super bright white. One way to mimic the look of stars underneath the lights is to splatter on stars that are a little bit more dull, which just means that they have a little bit more water to them. I like to use Dr Ph Martin's bleed proof white for stars. If you don't have some of that, then just plain old white gouache would work just as well. Normally when I paint on stars, I would get a pretty concentrated amount of this Dr Ph Martin's bleed proof white but when we're painting diluted stars, like more diluted ones, then I'm going to add a little bit more water than I normally would. The tricky part about that is if white Gouache is more wet than it should be, and sometimes it comes off and bigger in globs so you just want to make sure that you still have smaller globs. I'm just going to splatter on a few and I'm not going to splatter on as many as I normally would because once again, the lights dilute the stars so you can't see them as well as you normally would be able to. I'm just splattering on a few little stars here and being very generous with the amount of water that I'm using and making sure to put, especially if I'm going to splatter stars that are going on top of the colors of the lights. But I want to make sure those ones are especially diluted. Not too many. Let's just look at what that looks like up close. You can see I have a few stars here and a few of them are sitting on top of the lights, but they're pretty diluted and so you can't see them super well unless you're looking really closely and that's actually exactly the effect that we're looking for. There are stars and now let's finish this final project piece by painting a scene along the bottom here. 10. Final Project #1: Part Two: Like I mentioned before, I don't often have a specific composition in mind. I'm just going to paint what I feel like, but I'm going to use lamp black mostly over here. If you haven't taken my misty forest class, I would recommend it. It's one of my most popular classes. Misty forests are just pretty fun to paint but I'm going to give you a little taste of that here because I think I'm going to paint a little misty ridge line right here. First, I'm going to get the ridge line wet with water. Again, for more detailed look into how and why I paint misty forests this way, I would definitely recommend taking that class. I also have a YouTube video that's a little bit shorter of a tutorial on misty forest ridge lines if that is more interesting for you. Then I'm going to use my zero brush and a lighter. I'm not using fully pigmented black. I'm just going to use lightly pigmented black to mimic trees that are more in the distance. I'm just going to do some of them spindly, some of them more full. I always like to have a variety of different tree formations when I do things like this because that's how trees are in real life. There are hardly ever trees that all look the same and uniform and also it makes it a lot less pressure for you as you try to paint the same kind of tree or to paint the ''perfect tree every time.'' When painting misty forests, always be generous with the amount of water that you have because water is probably the most important component to mist and to capturing mist in watercolor. I think that's one of the funnest techniques that I teach in that class and a few other classes I teach that as well. I have a bunch of classes that are on forests. One class is on a winter wonderland forest. We paint a blizzard during a snowstorm forest. I have another monochrome forest class. That's where we paint rows and rows and rows of trees. That one's really fun, we talk a lot about color value in that class. Then I already talked about my misty forest class. Then of course I have my loose pines class where we just paint a bunch of different pine trees. I say pine trees, but I really mean coniferous trees, meaning they have cones instead of whatever else [LAUGHTER] leaves I think. [NOISE] I'm going to paint, I think one more tree right here and then I'm going to stop that misty ridge line so it's hovering in midair because I think that's a really cool effect. As you can see, this misty forest ridge line is pretty light color value and I think it looks pretty cool. But I'm granted, probably biased because I painted it. Let's have that dry and do the next part. Now that we've painted one misty forest ridge line, I want to paint more. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to paint, normally I would go from top to bottom because I'm doing this on a fly, and deciding I wanted to paint more of these misty ridge lines, I'm going to paint one up here. I'm going to show the rest of these trees do in a time-lapse. But just to show you what I'm going to do and talk about it beforehand, I'm going to paint another mystery ridge line back here and it's going to be even lighter than this one. Then I'm going to paint one more tree line, but it's going to be a full black down here. I'm going to have one ridge line up here, one right here, and then one coming down to meet at the bottom. I like to do things in threes or just odd numbers, but three is generally I think a good way to go. The reason I wanted to do one up here instead of the frame, the jutting of the branches coming out is because I wanted to fill up more of the space and I was just filling it more this time, but you should feel free to do whatever you want and experiment a little bit. This class is meant to teach you the techniques and then show you some potential ways that you can go so that you can come up with your own unique design. Let's move on to painting the trees. Have fun watching this little time-lapse. [MUSIC] There we have it. I hope you enjoyed that little time-lapse of all of these trees that I painted. I painted this light layer in the back and then a dark layer of bigger, larger trees just along the bottom here as a silhouette. I think that this turned out really nice. It turned out really cool. This was Method 1 of our Northern Lights painting where the lights come up from the bottom and just blend into the top in a more textured gradient. Next let's do our final project for the Method 2. See you then. 11. Final Project #2: Part One: Before we get started on this next video for our second final project, make sure that you have enough of both kinds of paint mixed for the project. We have this phthalo yellow, green and the color that I chose came in it's own tube. I have to dry it on my palette right here, and I just like to use a lighter value of it but the pinkish purple color of the aurora, I don't have so once again, in case you haven't watched the color mixing video, this is some opera pink right here. I like to mix to make this pinkish purple color. I like to mix opera pink and it's a lot of opera pink than anything else. I like to mix this opera pink [NOISE] with just a tiny bit of phthalo turquoise and that is going to make the pinkish purple that we're looking for. So before we get started, make sure that you mix enough of that. Now that we have mixed our colors, let's go ahead and get started. Just like with the method one, we're going to get our paper wet with some clean water. I'm using the same watercolor block, but this time I'm orienting it in the landscape position. That will become clear throughout these videos as we paint this final project. I'm getting my paper wet, but note, I'm actually only going to get about two-thirds of it wet and I'm making a squiggle line with my water to create a boundary so that my water doesn't go past that little squiggle line and because I have something else in mind, something in store for that little squiggle line. Here is the night sky. We've gotten it all wet and now it's time to put in the northern lights first. Like I said in other videos, you can start with the sky or the northern lights first. It doesn't really matter. It just depends on what you're more comfortable with and clearly I like to switch back and forth, so I'm just getting some green here and like we did in the practice method two I'm starting down here in my boundary and I'm going to make what amounts to a squiggle. I have made a little squiggle starting from the bottom and I'm going to make with my green two more while my painting is still dry. So I'm going to make one that goes a little bit more up like this, squiggle like that and then for my last one, I'm just going to have it be in the corner like that. Remember that for this method we want the squiggles to maintain their definition along the bottom. So basically, we're going to have this coming out from the bottom right here. We're going to be painting the night sky around the squiggles. I have the green squiggle and now we're using a lighter value, green and maybe I'm even going to add some fallow turquoise into that light value green. I'm just going to extend using the vertical, I'm painting strokes we talked about. Extend that green upward to provide a little buffer when we add the night sky. Use a combination of water and pigment and I like to use that phthalo turquoise mixed with it because it provides a good transition color between the phthalo yellow, green and the Payne's gray when we eventually add that color, which actually will be quite soon. Adding just a little bit more of this phthalo turquoise and if you find that your strokes are too watery, like you can't maintain the definition that you want, then it's one method that I use is when I wipe off the excess or when I wipe off the pigment that I don't want anymore. I also use my paper towel here. I'll bring it over here to show you. I have a bunch of my paint brushes on here. When I rinse off the pigment before I go to paint, I wipe off the excess water on my paper towel. I'm basically using like a semi dry brush to blend in the pigment here. That is one method that usually works pretty well for me. Then while this is still dry, we're going to add in along the bottom our purply pink color. Just to add even more depth and complexity to this aurora piece because northern lights or the aurora borealis can be all of these colors and that's what we're going for today. So extending it upward, I've put in the pink pigment now using those vertical motion, I'm maintaining the defined bottom squiggle that I initially made and just using these vertical motions, painting from the bottom color upward to blend in these colors together. Basically, it's just going to be from here before we add in the night sky. It's just going to be a lot of adding in more of one pigment that seems to have disappeared and then blending them together using the methods that we've already practiced. I'm doing that here by adding in more phthalo turquoise, adding in more phthalo yellow, green and the order that I have done it anyway is the turquoise is on top, the yellow-green is on bottom. I'm just going to try blending these together one more time before we add in the Payne's gray to complete this layer. Just because I complete the layer before I put it in the paint where I want to say, when I do pieces that involve a lot of wet-on-wet like this one does, it's actually quite a bit of painting time to get the paint to go exactly where I want it to go. It's not just one and done, I'm just blending everything together and now I'm done. It's a lot of patients and blending what different amounts of water control as I blend all the different colors together and still maintaining the shape that I want. So once again, if you find that your colors aren't staying in the shape that you initially want, it could be because you have too much water on your brush. [NOISE] My son has something to say about that. On your brush or on the paper or in your pigments. Any of those places could be culprits of too much water. Now, I'm going to blend in using the same methods [NOISE] this night sky. It's trickier to blend in the night sky when it's around the lights because like we talked about before, you don't want the sky to overtake the lights. You want to have some kind of buffer, which is why we have the phthalo turquoise but if you can't have a phthalo turquoise, if it doesn't really mesh with whatever layer you're working on, then water also works. I'm just using a brush with water to blend in the night sky here and I want some of the sky to shine through, but not all of it. But I want the aurora to shine through even more. Once I've finished that, then I'm going to add more pink aurora right here [NOISE] and continue with vertical brushstrokes that we talked about before. Now I'm going to go and do the same thing. Maintain these vertical brushstrokes and blend in the sky down below the Aurora right here. And I think that even right here, I have a little too much, so I'm just going to use some water to push away the pigment and then I'm going to add more of the pink in a minute. 12. Final Project #2: Part Two: We did one layer of putting in our colors and I put in the Northern Lights layers first and then I put in some sky color around it and now I'm going to go back and put in even more Northern Lights colors. I'm just going to get this whole layer wet again just like we did in the first final project. This layer is completely dry. I let it dry for a while, but then I also just for good measure, I used my heat tool to dry it again. I'm just going to get this layer completely wet once more and then we're going to add in even more of that defined layer of Aurora Borealis in the sky, just in the places where we had it. I think I may have talked about this, but just in case I didn't and I'm losing my mind. One trick, if you want to keep a more defined line in the wet-on-wet technique, it's important to wait a little bit for the water to evaporate a little bit before you start painting because the key to having blurry subjects while using the wet-on-wet technique so that they're still recognizable, but also still blurry, is not as much water. It's tricky to put down just the right amount of water when you want something like that so I find if I just put down a regular amount that I would normally do for the wet-on-wet technique and then wait for 30 seconds or one minute, then it will have dried enough that when I start painting, it will be the right amount of wetness that I need for it to retain its shape. Let's once again start with the green. I'm just making these little squiggles like I did before. I want it to be maybe just a little brighter. As I blend it in it's definitely going to not be quite so bright because the more water you use, the more diluted your pigment always becomes. That's helpful information to know. The more I blend the colors together, the more subtle the blends and the color pigmentation will be. As I'm doing that, I'm just adding the layers. Then using now those vertical brushstrokes to blend the layers together into the sky, washing off my brush sometimes in-between. But I want that nice cool vertical texture in my blends here. Even if some of the colors blend into each other like that, I think that can be pretty cool sometimes. I want this nice vertical texture going on here with these two colors. You might see that some of my brush strokes have gone off of the painting area. I'm just going to blend them as much as I can into the white, but honestly, I don't really care that much about that. I just want to keep having these cool vertical blends just like that. This one had a bunch of water on here, so I'm going to blend it a little. Then I'm not going to add much Payne's gray in general on this layer, but I am going to add a little bit right here. I'm using a very dry brush now to do my vertical brushstrokes. The dry brush also helps to blend it in when it's really wet down there anyway. Now I'm going to add some of my opera pink mixture just so I can have even more of that because that I think is the one that is losing some of its definition. This opera pink down here. Once I've added more of that, I am using this dry brush vertical strokes method to just blend them together right like that. Just blend it right in with the layers, trying to maintain the movement and trying not to get rid of the defined squiggle we have right here. I want to keep the bottom of that pigment basically in the same spot and just move from the middle of the pigmentation upward, just like that. It's looking pretty cool. I think it's definitely looking like a loose version, but loose watercolor is pretty much my specialty. That's basically what you're always going to get if you work with my first style of watercolor unless I specify otherwise. Before we move on really quick, this is still wet, which is good. Because I do want to add in some subtle places a little bit more to the sky. Just like right here, I don't need to add anymore in-between the lights because the lights are so bright that they are going to make the sky look a lot more dull than it normally is anyway. But in the corners, like right here, I am going to add a little bit more of this blue, partly to make it could be the sky, but it could also be some shadowy shapes in the background, which I think is a cool way to create texture and make it look like there are some trees that you can't see that are blocked by the darkness of night or whatever may be blocking the trees. I'm just going to subtly blend in a little bit of this blue. But then as we have more of it, I'm going to and I might need to wait until this has dried a little bit more so that I can keep the definition like I talked about. If your paper is a little bit drier, then usually that is better. But for now I'll just put the general shape in. Another note too is when you use a brush like this one, this Princeton Neptune brush, which mimics a real sable hairbrush, those tend to hold a lot more water than other kinds of brushes. If you are looking to control your water a lot, I would recommend potentially using a different brush, but this is what I'm using for now just because. I have that tree shadowy shape and I'm just adding some highly pigmented along the bottom here. I don't want to extend it too far. Really just along the bottom. I know that this is a little different from [LAUGHTER] the potential mountains that I showed you so you don't have to do. For your final project, you can follow me to the T if you want to or you can do the other subjects that we practiced, like those layered mountains are pretty cool. But I thought working with the night sky a little bit like this would be fun. I'm moving over to this now less wet, still definitely wet, but less so sky over here. Just notice how I'm not really painting detailed trees, that's partly because it would be for not, the details would get lost. But also partly because to show you that you don't have to paint super detailed things in order for it to look cool. As a side note, I checked over here and some of the sky was creeping into the lights, like watercolor tends to do, which is fine. But I'm just going to add a little bit of water as a buffer though between them. It's not quite so much that you get those bleeding creeper watercolor lines. But instead, you have a little bit more of this misty, ethereal, watery buffer zone between these layers. Like I said, working with a wet-on-wet technique, especially when painting the Northern Lights is just a lot of working the paint and dabbing the paint and also embracing imperfection and knowing that it's not meant to be perfect anyway. Why try? Along the same lines I'm going to use the dry brush technique over here to just dab away. You see how there are these tendrils right here. I just don't really want them so I'm going to take a dry, clean brush and just give a little bit of shape to these background trees that we painted, just a little bit of shape to help get rid of that too watery bleed look that I didn't really want from the sky and help make these look a little bit more like trees. That's basically what I'm doing and now to finish up this layer, I'm going to paint one more with some highly pigmented. Notice how I switched brushes here, because my Neptune brush, which was like a sable hairbrush, it just had too much water on it. It was too hard to control. I decided to use this Princeton Glacier series brush, which is synthetic sable hair still, but it's a little stiffer. I'm better able to control my water output on the brush with it. We're going to call that good. Maybe we'll do just some little blurry things here, just along the lines here to add even more depth to this piece. I'm going to call that good for the sky. The goal of this method was to be able to still see the squiggles and to have that vertical up and down texture and for the most part, I think we did achieve that. I'm going to call that a win for this layer. Northern Lights are tricky, but I think you can definitely get some results that you're really happy with and I'm really happy with this result. I'm not done yet though. Tune in to the next video to see where I take this piece next. 13. Final Project #2: Part Three: All right. Now that this layer has dried, we're going to continue with our northern lights piece, and you may have surmised at this point that the reason I only painted the first part of the sky is because I want the bottom half to be snow. [LAUGHTER] I want to paint some snow. This is taking some techniques from my Watercolor Wilderness Blizzard class, but basically, we're going to use the wet-on-dry technique to just paint in a few snow banks and shadows basically. That's a combination really of the wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry technique. First, along the top ridge here, I took a very light color gray, which I think in my palette it's like a mix of Payne's Gray, and black actually with a lot of water mixed into it. I just drew a little line, a little crackly line in the middle of the snow, and then I'm going to take water, and meet some of the paint that I just painted, and bring it down, but also I'm not creating a big hole wash. I'm just creating some little textures with my wet brush that has a little bit of paint on it. If you can't quite see that, see I'm not painting the whole thing, I'm really just painting shadows on the snow, and I'm going to continue doing that. I got some of this wet here, I don't really have a rhyme reason honestly to why I'm putting the shadows. I know that I got some of this paper right here wet, and that partly was to create a little bit of texture, and to help make it look like there's mounds of snow on here. Makes sense? I'm going to keep doing that. I started with that side, and now I'm going to move over here, and have a trail off into the distance like that. Basically just do the same thing where I'm creating these little wet textures, and then I'm going to go back, and add in some more shadows along those lines. I'm just dotting, tapping my paintbrush, and doing it that way. I don't really have much of an agenda with where I'm putting these textures here. Honestly, that's partly for my own sanity. I was always really terrified to paint white things because I knew that in order to make them look realistic, I really was needing to be painting shadows, and the idea of having a figure out exactly where shadows were supposed to go just terrified me. I would never try anything, and recently, I [LAUGHTER] have decided that nature is supposed to be wild and crazy, and so I can be too. That means I'm not really worrying where the shadows are "supposed to be." I'm just letting my brush go where it's going to go, and know that as long as I'm using a very light color value anyway, it's not going to mess it up too badly. When you look at snow, it's hardly ever just white. You're never really looking at white. You're looking at a bunch of different values and hues together all in one place but in your mind because you know that snow is white, you don't really register it that way when you look at it without seeing it from an artist's perspective. But next time you see snow, think about all the different colors that you actually see when you look at it, and hopefully this technique will make a little more sense. That is my snowy ground, and now to finish this scene, I'm just going to paint a few foreground trees to provide one last layer of depth. I'm going to wait for this snowy ground to dry, and then I'm going to paint those trees. I will see you soon. Okay, welcome back. Our snow mounts have dried, and now for the final touch on this piece, I'm going to paint in some foreground trees. The foreground trees are going to be wet-on-dry for sure, very defined, and big, and right in the middle, not the middle, but they're going to be so that you can see them, and they're going to contrast against these background trees. See how the diluted pigment that we used in the background here to make these tree shapes now look like they're just these big tree shapes in the background. That's awesome. They're going to look even cooler once we paint our foreground tree. I'm going to make it the biggest one, and I'm just going to put it, I like putting my foreground trees off to the side, and I'm going to have a go all the way down. Using the tree painting techniques that I teach in a bunch of other classes, just putting a bunch of blobs down on this tree. I'm going to give it some friends because I like to paint things in threes. One more. When I paint trees in threes, I always like to paint them different sizes. I don't know why, but I just do. I'm going to call that good. There is my northern lights scene. One thing you could do after this is if you want to put snow on the trees, totally could. If you have your opaque paint from the stars, I often like to use that Dr. Ph. Martin's bleed proof white to put snow on trees, and if you're interested in seeing how I do that, my Wilderness Watercolor Blizzard class is all about that. You could also paint trees using whitespace that look like they have snow on them. I talked a little bit about that and my Blizzard class as well, but I think for this scene, I like it just having the trees be this black, that stark white against the snow, and against the lights, and I think that having these trees be black against the lights, and against the background trees, I just think this scene looks really cool. I think having this very defined trees be going like contrasting and juxtapose with these faint, and blurry but still more defined squiggles of the northern lights makes him look super cool. That is final project number 2, and I hope that you had a good time during this class. I think that northern lights can be such an intimidating subject, they definitely were for me. Doing this class was also intimidating for me because while I had painted northern lights pieces before, I really wanted to nail the techniques so that I could feel comfortable teaching them. That's often the case with me, even if I know how to paint something, I don't like to actually make a class about it until I feel comfortable describing the techniques. Northern lights especially as such just go with the flow, and use the wet-on-wet technique, and generally do these strokes but also play with it because water is going to do what it's going to do. It's not my most comfortable place to be to say just experiment, and you'll figure out what it's supposed to be along the way, but that's where I am because northern lights are a tricky beast with watercolor for sure. But I think that you can get some really cool pieces if you just let go of the control, and let the water color do what it does best, and as you do that, you'll also learn how watercolor works, and how you can manipulate it and control it, I don't want to say control, how you can guide it in some ways to make it a little different, little more defined in the future. With that, I hope you had a great time, and I will see you in the recap video where I talk about what's next to other classes that you might like, and where you can find me on social media. But in the meantime, if you don't make it to that video, I would encourage you to, if you really liked the class, or you have anything you want to say about it, please leave a review because it really helps, first of all, as a teacher for me to know what I can do better or what I did well this time that also in terms of finding my classes. If you leave a review, it's easier for other people to find my classes in the future. If you are looking for ways to help teachers of online classes out, that is the way, [LAUGHTER] is to leave a review. But regardless of what you do, I'm so happy that you decided to take this class. I hope you had a great time and I will see you soon. 14. Recap: Thank you so much for joining me for my Watercolor Northern Lights class today. I had so much fun making this class with you and experimenting with watercolor to come up with some other techniques that I've found to be helpful. I hope that this class was helpful for you too as you were experimenting not only with forming northern lights but also with all kinds of watercolor techniques and subjects. If you really liked this class, I have lots of other wilderness classes on Skillshare. I teach a lot about trees. I have a several forests and some night sky classes. Make sure to check my Skillshare page to see my full class list. If you really loved the projects that you made, just for reference, here are the ones that I made. This is project Number 1 and this is project Number 2. If you really loved the projects that you made, please feel free to post them on the project gallery in Skillshare, even if you just post work in progress shots in the project gallery, I would love to see. The project gallery is also a good place to get feedback from me. I check all the galleries for all of my classes to make sure that I answer any questions that are there. If you have questions, you can also feel free to start a discussion in any of the classes and I would love to have open communication there as well. Finally, if you really loved this class, I would really appreciate it if you left a review. Any honest feedback is not only helpful for me as a teacher, just as I continue to make more classes for you. But it's helpful for me because the more reviews a class has, the more Skillshare's algorithm notices my class. If you want to help me out, then that is one way that you could do that. The only problem is you can only post a review on Skillshare right now that may change in the future, but right now you can't do it on the mobile version of Skillshare. I'm pretty sure you can only do it on the desktop version. If you're confused like you're looking where to leave a review and it's nowhere to be found, you have to go to the desktop version, so hopefully that answers some of your questions. Finally, again, if you really loved your project and want to share it with the world, I would love to see anything posted on Instagram. Just make sure to tag me. My handle is This Writing Desk. If you tag me and let me know that you took my class, I will most definitely like and leave a comment on your project. But there's also a very good chance that you could be featured in my stories. I do features for Skillshare a few times a month. Thanks again for joining my class and I hope to see you next time.