Watercolor: Paint a Beautiful, Realistic Galaxy

1. Introduction: In this class, I'm going to teach you everything you need to know in order to paint a stunning story watercolor galaxy in under an hour. Everything you need to know about watercolor basics, and blending will be covered in great detail, so that no matter what your skill level, you can make something beautiful. I'll show you my techniques you can use to create some really cool effects, so that your peace will look realistic and bright. I'll show you the supplies you need, for most color paintbrushes and paper all the way through to stretching a watercolor paper to prevent warping. You'll learn everything from pursuing the foundation of color down straight through to adding stars and highlights at the very end plus you can apply these techniques to any watercolor painting you choose to make in the future. This class is super simple and [inaudible] , and by the end, you'll create a gorgeous galaxy of your own in any color that you wish. I look forward to having you in the class, and saying your beautiful galaxies. 2. Watercolor: Let's start talking about supplies. Now, I will leave a supply list in the description that you guys can check out. This means that I'm going to be talking about neither of these are crazy extortionately priced. And both very good. This one is by Winsor and Newton, is the Travel Cotman Set. It is like dry watercolors. So basically to activate them, you need to add water to them because they're just they're dry, solid water colors. And I have used these many times, they last forever. I loved them and this one kind of popping out. They run in the 30-$40 range for this particular set, I forgot exactly. But they're very good. I love them. Comes with the little section for you to use multiple colors on. And it's nice to, again as travel sets so it's nice to travel with. These ones are by Dr. Ph. Martin. These are a liquid form of watercolor. You have a little dropper and you put the tiniest amount with water, and you can get a vibrant color from that. This set runs for around $60 which is a great deal for the vibrancy of these particular colors and what you're kind of getting with them. So it's up to you. I would recommend starting off with something like the Winsor Newton Cotman set that you don't need to solve, splurge out too much. You've cost a half to spend this kind of money. If you want to start out with the Crayola set that you can find in Walmart, Target, that is fine as well. They work really good. These ones, I personally prefer and feel that you get a super vibrant look from. 3. Paper: Okay, so these are the watercolor pads I'm just going to go through. Of course, there are hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of different types of paper that you can use for water coloring, but these are just three that I thought I would mention. These two are by Strathmore this one is a small 15 sheet, 6 by 9 size it's a cold press paper. The main difference between hot press and cold press paper is that cold press paper has more of a texture to it so it has that traditional watercolor texture, hot press paper has a much smoother finish. They press it with hot rollers in order to make it smooth and flat, whereas this one, they don't do that. So I really love Strathmore. You can get these are any of your local craft stores, basically Hobby Lobby, Michaels, JOANN's, wherever you're going to go. They're great quality and these basically are the same paper, to be honest, it's just a different size. They work really nicely, is what you need it for probably normally get these for under $10 and they work really, really well. This one is by Arteza, I again forget the price of these. It is very, very smooth. So you haven't got such a grain and texture in your watercolor paper. So it really is totally up to you what you decide to go with. Honestly, you don't need to be too fussy. I would go with something like Strathmore or Arteza, something that's got decent reviews on it. Because whenever you are applying water to paper, even if it is watercolor paper, you're going to find that it does warp, it does bend. I will show you a way to combat that bending and that warping that you get with water. But this video, because we're gonna be using our little square, we're not going to have to worry too much about the edges peeling upwards. So that's it for watercolor paper. If you do have any questions, please do feel free to ask me. I will get back to you as soon as I can. Yeah let's get started on a few different supplies. 4. Paintbrushes and more: Onto brushes and pencils. Now, brushes you don't have to worry too much. These are super, super cheap paint brushes. This one is for watercolors, it's called an oval wash. I like to use this one quite frequently because it's quite big and it's made perfect, rounded and perfect for watercolors. These ones are not necessarily marketed as watercolor brushes. Normally, you'll find that they'll have more thickness or more roundness to them. These are more for acrylics, but I tend to just use whatever I have. I'm not too fussy. You're going to want a small detail brush, if you can, and maybe more of a rounded one, like this one. But overall, I'm not too fussy. This one here. Is this a good color brush? I can't remember. This one is quite decent as well because it's got that roundedness, and you have more flexibility with those colors, when you have more of a rounded soft edge. Really, you don't need them to be too super expensive. These are from Walmart, so you can get some paint brushes from Walmart. This one was from Michaels. They're all basically cheap and cheerful. Just don't get those ones with those strange fibers to them. They're awful brushes, I just don't like them at all. These ones with the soft fibers are great though. You can also use something like this. This is a water brush. Basically, you fill it up with water and as you're painting you can squeeze it out so you don't need to keep going back and forth to glasses of water, basically. That's really, really helpful. You can also stick inks and you could actually stick the watercolor like these ones here. What you could do is you could take a drop of these, drop into that, put some water in and then you just basically got the entire color, really, really vibrant the whole time. But I like to just fill it with water. Then I can just move my watercolor around as much as I want. These are by Pentel by the way, which I didn't mention before. They're about $10 for three of these, but they are worth it and I do recommend them and they have a nice rounded edge again, which is what you want. As for pencils, I love mechanical pencils whenever I'm making something that I'm going to be either painting over or using watercolor over just to do a quick sketch. These ones are by Pentel, these are GraphGear 500. This one is 0.3, which is basically the thickness of the lead inside. They're really, really good. I also have the same one, the Pentel 0.5. This one has slightly thicker lead to it. Not too much, but it's always nice to have a variation in thickness. These are the refills I have, I have a 2H for the 0.3, which is this one, and then I have 3H and 2B, which are for the 0.5. Basically that means how soft or hard the graphite or the lead is going to go onto the paper. For this, you're basically going to want something that's really, really thin and something that's really, really light, so I recommend getting a 2H pencil. It doesn't have to be mechanical, but the lines are always going to be thinner and more controlled with a mechanical pencil. I do recommend those highly. Basically anything that is in the H range, for example, this one is 2H. You can actually get something like an 8H or a 9H. Those are going to be even lighter of a lead than these ones. You're going to want something super, super light. I might not end up using these for this particular watercolor painting. But that's fine. You can always get away with just using it without that, you can paint just the shapes with this. But, if ever you are doing watercolor painting and you want some sketch, I highly recommend getting a pencil like this. Again, supply list is in the description. Also, you can have a kneadable eraser like this. These are very controlled and you can get in with the little crevices if you need to erase anything, which is handy with cold press watercolor paper. 5. Highlights ; inks, pens: Now, for the pencils, we can now go into the whites, the highlights, you can use something basic like white acrylic. Here's just a very, very basic Windsor and Newton titanium white acrylic paint, these work really, really good because you're going to be wanting to do stars and things like that with your galaxy. So they work well. If you don't want to use a paint, you can use a jelly roller, which these are very, very good that white highlight pens. A lot of people ask me what these are called and they are just called Jelly Roll pens and they just no matter what you do. you can for example, I use it to draw on here, you get that nice white ink, which is really, really great, especially if you're trying to do stars and highlights on things. Other than that, I'm actually going to try using this Dr P H Martin, Bombay white India ink, which I think should be really, really interesting. It's a very, very pure white ink and I think it should be fun to try this out, but basically any three of these things will work in your favor. They will just work really, really well for you. So it's up to you. The jelly roll is going to probably be the cheapest it is usually about three, $4 for a pack of two. You can get super cheap white paint doesn't have to be Windsor Newton, of course. All the ink was around $7, I believe it was. So, again, it's totally up to you and what your preferences are. 6. Stretching: Now we're going to talk about some masking tape. Now this is not specifically made for any form of painting. You might want to get some decent proper artist's tape, but I don't have any right now, I'm going to just use some simple old masking tape. The thing with this stuff is it's very strong and it can rip your paper easily. One way to combat that is to put the tape on, say, your sleeve, or your clothes, and just wrap it around a little bit to get some fibers on it so it doesn't make it as sticky, which is really, really helpful. We'd want to make sure that it's going to be sticky but not too sticky that it rips you paper when you take off. Just something like that gets some fibers on the back. It's a little bit less sticky now, and then you can apply it to your paper. Now we are going to talk about stretching your watercolor paper. This is something that I didn't know about, and a lot of people don't know about it unless they've been taught this, or they've been doing watercolors for a while. Now, if you're doing watercolors, everything is covering the entire page, and go right out to the edges, you're going to need to stretch your watercolor paper. When you're doing something like this, and you've just got to in the middle of the paper, you don't need to worry about it too much. But notice how the paper will walk slightly whenever you put water on it. Even though this is watercolor paper, it is very heavy paper. Watering the paper in general just don't mix. Now, what watercolor paper do you get? Even arches, which is the most basically prestigious watercolor paper that you can get your hands on, online will walk upon you, which is a bit annoying, but there are ways around it. As I say, we're not going to need to do this for this video, but if you do decide to cover your entire page in a galaxy or a watercolor painting, you're going to need to do this. Basically what you do is you need to get a wet sponge, or you can take a wet flannel like this, and then you're going to want to turn your paper over, and you're going to want to dampen the back very, very lightly like this, until the watercolor paper has soaked up all of the water. Now what you can do is you can do on the back, and you can do on the front, notice how the paper is instantly warping because its wet, and that's fine, that's good. That's what we want. We want to really soak the paper with water. We're going to dampen it, both sides. A lot of people just damp on one side, but I like to do two sometimes. Then what you can do is you can take your masking tape, don't forget to stick it onto your sleeve, and then try to get some fibers on it to make it less sticky. If you get proper artist type, you don't need to do this. But because I am out, I'm going to just use this, and there we go. Now what I'm going to do is you're going to want to use normally a flat board or something flat. I'm currently using an acrylic plastic sheet that goes over the top of my desk, and I'm just going to simply put my masking tape over the wet paper as such. I'm going to do that round all corners of the paper. Once this is done, the paper is damp, what you can do is you can either leave it to dry, or one way that you can really, really help us is to get a hairdryer, or a blow dryer, and put heat on it until it's dried out. The paper will still warp at the end, but usually if you're lucky, it will warp anywhere near as much. This is basically why, if you ever see artists with paper like, it's because not only are they stretching the paper, but you also get that really nice white border around the edges of your paper. That's it for the structuring side of things, and let's move on to getting our paper to be more like this. This is approximately the size I'm going to want, so all I can do is I can cut the edges, and then stick my tape on after that. All I'd like to do is apply my tape to the middle of the paper before I cut it, because if I make any mistakes, I can more than likely cut it out. What I'm going to do is to take my tape, I certainly do not recommend scotch tape because it was very good type and it's too strong. Maybe get some masking tape from the $ store or the pen shop, or wherever you left because it's not going to be as sticky. There we go. Now basically I'm going to have this [inaudible] complete watercolor, and then I'm going to cut along these lines so I can have a nice border at the end. If you don't know what I mean, you will see right towards the end. But for now, this is what we've got. This is the surface area, and making sure that this is all tightly done, we can now start watercoloring. 7. Beginning the Watercolor Part 1: Now, I highly recommend looking through at nebulas and galaxies on Google. We want somewhat of a reference picture to follow, just so you know the direction that we're going in. Once you've done this a few times, you don't really need one but, it's always nice to have that, to get a general idea of what you want to do. I'm going to try something like this, it's not a real galaxy, but just the shape is what I'm looking at, and I think that should be fun and good to do. This is what I'm going to follow, I'm not going to do it exactly because it's actually isn't even a real galaxy, it's more of the colors I want to look at. I think it would be nice and fun. I love doing paper galaxies. Basically, how we're going to start this is with watercolors, you can put dark down and then go lighter. That's something you could do with acrylics, but not watercolors. You need to start with the lightest color, and then fade back to the darkest color. We're going to start off with these lovely light pinks and purples, and then we're going to add the blacken afterwards and then blend it in quite nicely. Then we'll add a little bit of white to it at very end with our India ink. But for now, we're just going to start off with some of these purples and pinks, and then basically go from there. Put our reference there. I'm going to start off with, this is phthalo blue, and we have ultramarine blue, and we have a nice purple color here. This one is cobalt violet. We're going to just take some of these colors. Taking our little palette here, watercolor palettes are quite easy to clean off because they're watercolors but, it's still hard to clean them off perfectly. But that is fine, we shall leave it as is. Now I'll take a little bit of purple and drop it right there. You only need the tiniest little amount. I'm going to take my glass of water here, and I'll dampen my brush, and then add quite a lot of water to this color. It's a very pretty color. I'm just going to take my watercolor here, and simply just lay it on the surface in a strange shape. You can be quite messy with this because it doesn't matter too much. What I'm going to do is add a little bit more purple pigment to the watercolor palette we have here. We can get a little bit more vibrant. If I do this, I'm going to have a nice purple pigment right there. For now, I'm not going to worry too much about the dark colors because I want to try and work on the lighter colors. But it's nice because you can really soak the paper in water and then add some pigment to it and it will really soak, splurge out everywhere. Now, I'm going to take some pink, I'm going to add some water to that. This will blend really nicely with the purple if we just go along here like this. Look how nice that blends in there. Don't be afraid to use a lot of water. It can get a point where it gets too much, but it's nice to just dab it on and see what it wants to do. The beauty of watercolor is that it blends so prettily with the other colors, so it's always worth giving it a go to see what you can create. If you want a lighter color, what you need to do is just add more water. For example, this pink, if I just keep adding water to it, it's going to be very faint and it's not going to be as dark. You're always going to want to paint in like a shape as well because if you notice with something like this, there's a lot of dark shadows and dark clouds in shapes all around it. It's lovely in light, and then has dark parts. This is something about bright galaxies hard to get, but once you've mastered how they look, then you should be well on your way. I'm going to add a little more pink here, not too much because we don't want to overpower the purple. Add a little bit more purple. If we look at our reference here, we're not really copying exactly, but notice where the darker shadows are, the purple is also darker while the blue is also darker, so we can around the edges add a little bit of a darker color like this, so that it more naturally falls into the shadows like that. It's a bit of a process, but it's well worth giving a go. Now notice there's a little bit of red in the reference here, like a red orange mostly that looks really nice. What I'm going to do is add a little bit of red there. Then I think I'm going to mix it a little bit with the pink. If I take the red, and a little bit of pink. You can mix watercolors quite nicely, but don't be afraid to do so. You might get to a point where your paper's getting really, really damp, so you might need to back off a little bit. An easy way to get the paper to dry quickly is to get a blow dryer or hairdryer and just let it dry. For me, I'm just going to let it pull as it is and then I will come back to it when is a little bit more dry. 8. Watercolor Details Part 2: We strive we can we see that we have a lot more pigment we can add to it, it's a little bit too light here. We're going to take our reference picture again, take a look at that. We can see that we can add lot more pink and purple and different colors to this. I'm going to take a smaller brush like this size, get some water on it like this. I think I'm going to go for a pink color here. They're really start adding that in. Get over more control with a smaller brush. But it's also more difficult to be messy and professional looking if that's the word. It looks a lot more strange. Can take a little bit more purple again, this a little bit too dark. I've notice a lot with galaxies that you have a lot of shapes and gases that look like clouds. They go up with an inwards like this. In the middle here, we have a light white which we're going fill in after, but we also have a few more light pink and purple paths. I'm going to take a lot more water. Take it with pink and mix up with the purple. We get a different purple. We are going to add this in here, and a few little drops here and there. It's really swelling inwards. Adding a bit more water. When you add water, it can really so flare out and look really nice. I think what am going to do now, is am going to add some bit more of red. This might help solve. Turn it down a little bit more purple. Blend out. If ever you feel that you've put too much color in one spot. You easily used water to just really blend it back out again which is nice. You're going to want similar colors like pink and red. For example, it can the reference it, they blend in together. You can always go back and forth with two colors to really achieve the results that you want. If you add a lot of water to one spot like this, you can add some water. You can then grab a color and then just drop it in. It'll take on a mind of its own. I think I'm going to get some blue now and add some blue to this. I think this is a little bit too blue, I'm going to take some purple and mix it in with the blue to get more purply violet blue. We've a different tone and shade which is nice to add in there. We're going to stop pulling out the color now to something a little bit more darker, just let light lead inwards. You always going to notice nebulous, they pull inwards. You have the bright colors and then the dark was pulled into that brightness. That's what we're trying to achieve here. Usually you'll find that the dark colors around it are necessarily black than more blue. Sometimes more violet it depends in tally. But for example, notice if you look in this reference image that it's bright here and we have to darker pulling inwards. We also have some darker in the middle here slightly. We can definitely add that in now we've done the brightness. Very slightly not too much because we don't want to be too much. If you use some little squiggles here for this. If you feel that you've done too much, just get some water on your brush and you can blend out a little bit to make it look a little bit more natural and realistic. Can vacuum without blue's. Now, I'm going to go around here the edges. It's a little bit more blue. You're always going to want to make sure that the center of the bright colors have dried somewhat before you start going into the dark outside colors because otherwise it'll just fade in together and not look good at all. I'm going to continue on adding some darkness. Pulling in the dark to the galaxy. Basically we are gradually pulling out galaxy, the nebula until it gets darker. Slowly pulling it outwards. Notice how that cloud the way that it goes inwards and then there's light patches around it. The way that we achieve this is to put some darkness into here. We're going to pull upwards into the lightness. Basically take some dark color and push it up, into the lightness, but not too much. Just little dabs. That achieves that more cloud like appearance. Then you can also do it around the spits here is light and this here lights. If we do a bit of dark here, it's light underneath. It's light above and it's light underneath. You can just go around it to give it more natural look like that. We're going to go in with open a dark and this bit dark here and this bit here, put it down a little here. Pull it inwards. This over here we're going to darken this. To make it look more cloud like a little with darkness here as well, just in an end shape. Then I pull it out. If you find yourself with too much water on the paper just take a break, use a blow dryer, blow dry out, dry it, wait for it to dry and then you can just go straight back in. If you wait don't wait on the tool and it's just too wet and its all going to blend in and not look together not look good at all. I'm just going to take my black. I am going to just apply this all the way around. Usually as I say, galaxies aren't going to be pure black anyway. But we can also blend it with a little bit of purple if we want to. Right around the edges. Don't be afraid to go to the tape as well because it's protecting the edges. Push it up into the darker colors on the outside. Pull inwards, dark on the black side blend into the colors and that's okay because it helps to blend it better. I'm done with blending in with black. We're go wait for this to dry somewhat. Then we can a little bit better blend in the other colors with that. 9. Finishing Watercolor Part 3: You might feel that this here doesn't look too natural. It's a little bit patchy for a nebula. All we can do is we can add a little bit of water to that, to the edges and reset the paper to blend out a little bit better, if that's what you are looking for. I'm not going do it too much because I like the texture, but we also want it to look quite good. Using a little bit of water could always fix the problem. I need a little bit of darkness here, adding a bit of shadow, doctoring it in with the detail brush. Don't be afraid of adding darkness, but don't add too much either. It's definitely still the process that you need to work on. But now, we're just going to blend these colors out a little bit better, and we get some purple. I'm happy with what I've got now color-wise and what I'm going to do now is, I think I'm going to add a little bit of lightness to this. Now, I do have some white water color. I have yet to use this, so I'm not sure how it's going to turn out, but we will give it a go. Hopefully, it'll work over the darkness. I got a bit of that. I'll just take my small brush, get a little bit of white here, and then just, there we go, like lightning, it's going to be very smeared out and jagged. We want it to look jagged, which is good. Let it bleed on the water a little bit. Just letting it bleed like that. Going to go back in with a little bit of pink. You can always go back and forth between colors, which is nice. I'm quite happy with the white that I've got now. I'm not going to add too much because it can make it look fake and unnatural rather than letting it bleed like that, especially into the black, we might want to let it bleed a little bit. I'm going to leave it like that now and we're going to come back in a bit when it's dry and add some stars. You might find that it dries quite pale, so you might need to go back in with a darker color and just add that in to darken up a little bit. We also find that you want to again, go back in with some color and blend that out a bit so it looks more natural. It's nice to add cloud shapes in with more vibrant colors to illuminate the shape a little bit better. 10. Adding Stars: Now, I'm going to take my wet ink like this, spread some more pink over this, could actually add a little bit white water color to your paper watercolor to lighten up a little bit. Now, I am going to take my white ink, which is right here, this is again by Ph Martin's Bombay White India Ink, and we're going to take the smallest amount onto a palette. We're going to take a brush that has brussels very easily bent and spread out, so we're going to dip our ink onto this brush and just flick it, take it dip it in, and then just flick it like this. Often find it quite good to actually physically add them in myself, but it's nice to blotter them like that, because it gives it a more star-like effect. Some areas as well can be more concentrate with stars than others and that's totally fine, I'm good, so we've got that. We're now going to take a small detailed brush, dip in the ink, and then just add the dots in ourselves, you can also use the white jelly roll pen, but I find this to be a lot more vibrant, just also add a little bit more black here actually. We're going to keep adding stars dotting around, stars are going to be different shapes and sizes. We can also add in stars, that look a little bit, like that, like traditional little stars, but I'm going to keep it simple with my white ink and then just splatter them in like this, a little more black, always go back in with black and add some more in darker colors, but you can never get back in with lighter colors, and while this dries we're just going to keep adding our white ink directly with that. Some areas you may want to actually highlight physically with the white ink, like this because it's kind looks cloud-like, you want to pick out the parts that look like a cloud, for example, this part here, this shape looks, normally a cloud is basically a combination of gases, but I call it clouds because it looks a bit like clouds, and just outline the shapes, have our palettes, because they all lift up by the colorful gases. Let's just outline this, well that needs darker parts too, as you can see, it is very important, but not too much, don't go too heavy on it, you don't want to ruin it. I will leave it, I think I'm going to leave it at that, because I'm quite happy with the highlights on this, got a few more on the corner. Corner's still a bit whacks, I ended up having tried more black to it, then again, that is what we do to make a galaxy basically. Now I'm going to let this completely and utterly dry, and then I will remove this masking tape and reveal our beautiful, lovely straight-lined picture. Okay, so now it's basically completely dry and I'm going to remove the tape, so being very careful, I'm pulling the tape towards the painting, very gently because you do not want to rip the paper. This is a very satisfying thing today by the way, it's very satisfying, there's one part. Try not to pull away from it because it can often rip, sometimes you just want to pull it directly up, one more piece, it wants to come off, this one masking tape, so a little bit of a paint because it likes to rip where it shouldn't rip, there we go, it looks pretty good. We do have a few parts where the water color did bleed. Something like this all you need to do is literally just grab a paintbrush, get some white acrylic paint or white ink, usually acrylic paint, we've asked for this, and then we're just going to just paint the edges that don't look too good, like that. Basically we are done other than signing our name, which is always a fun thing to do. I'm going to use a micron pen here, and just sign my name in the bottom right corner, left corner, actually I'm going to do up here, there we go, sign my name. Now what we can do is we can cut it to size if that's what we want to do, and obviously I'm not going to keep on this sheet of paper, but I'm going to cut it like that, but this is our finished piece. What do you think? I'm just so quite happy with that. I really like doing nebulous with purples and pinks. Radius was achieved with literally four, five colors. It's very easy to achieve a whole variation of pinks, and blues, and purples when you mix them together, so that's what we've got. Thanks for watching. I hope that was helpful to you. If you do have any questions on the resources, there is a document that has all resources available on the class description. But other than that, hopefully everything is covered, but if you do have any questions, do feel free to ask me. I will get back to you soon as I can, and that's what we've got. Thank you for watching. 11. BONUS: Green Galaxy Speedpaint: - Uh , - yeah .