Watercolor Rainbow Galaxies

1. Intro: Hi. My name is Kolbie and I am a self-taught watercolor artist. If you are watching this video, it's likely because you are interested in making galaxies that look a little bit like this or this or even this one. If you are, you are in luck because my class is all about creating a rainbow galaxy. I think that watercolor is one of the most therapeutic ways to wind down and relax and also stress-free ways to create something really beautiful with your life. I say that having a background, thinking that I would never be an artist, I was never good at art, and being really okay with that. But about three years ago, I picked up a watercolor brush and I couldn't put it down. That's how I know if I can go from zero to artist, so can you. This class is probably an intermediate class. If you have taken other watercolor classes before, I think you'll definitely be ready to take this next step. So without further ado, let's jump in to all of everything I know about creating rainbow galaxies. I just know that you're going to create something stunning and that you will be proud of. At the very least, you'll walk away knowing some new techniques with the tools and resources that you'll need to continue honing your art skills to be even better in the future. Let's go. 2. Materials: If you have already taken the beginners galaxy course, then most of these materials are going to look very similar to you. In fact, I use almost all of these materials in all of my classes. But for those of you who are joining me for the first time, I'm going to briefly overview which materials I'm going to be using in this class. It is probably also helpful for you to know that these are the materials that I use constantly almost all the time. So let's first talk about paint brushes. When I paint watercolor pieces, I love to have a big brush to put a lot of paint on the page and I usually also loved to have a detailed brush. In this case I have a round number 12, so that's the size it is. Round is the shape of the bracels, 12 is the size of the actual brush. A round number 12, a watercolor brush. This is synthetic sable hair so no animals were used in the making of this paintbrush. Then I also have a round number zero paintbrush for detail work. Both of these are Princeton brands, they are a different series of Princeton brand. This first brush with a red handle is the Princeton heritage series. This is probably one of my very favorite series of watercolor brushes. I have almost all of them and I use them constantly. Then this is from the Velvetouch series, which is pretty similar to the Heritage Series, Velvetouch came out more recently. They're both synthetic but I would classify Velvetouch as a little stiffer than the Heritage Series, but I use both of these lines very frequently and these are the two brushes I'm going to be using for this class today. Next, let's talk about paint. Because this is a class all about creating a rainbow, you would think that I would have a rainbow of paint colors, which if you do, if you have all the colors in the rainbow, so red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, you should definitely go for it. If you want to use all the colors, you can. But for this particular class, I'm going to show you how you don't have to have all of the colors of the rainbow to create all of the colors of the rainbow. Because if you know anything about color theory, which we will do a brief recap of color theory as well in this course, you know that if you have the primary colors, some variation of red, yellow, and blue, then you can create every color on the spectrum. For this class, I'm going to be painting only using these primary colors plus black and some white paint for the stars. There are lots of different paints that I could recommend. For today though, I'm going to be using these Daniel Smith extra fine watercolors and the indigo, permanent red deep, and lemon yellow. All of these colors are on their basic line, so if you buy Daniel Smith extra fine watercolors tubed like this. These are all series one, which means that they are cheaper. They're the cheapest of the tubes that you can buy and they're super basic. I found that getting pretty standard colors like this, not any other different shade of these colors, especially for creating really vibrant rainbows, makes the most vibrant colors. Again, that's indigo, permanent red deep, and lemon yellow and this Daniel Smith extra fine watercolors. In our color theory video, I'm going to be swatching all of the colors of the rainbow using these. One note on black, I like to use black as a contrast. You can also mix your own black. If you don't have black typically, the standard recipe for mixing your own black is your darkest red mixed with your darkest green. Sometimes people add a little bit of dark blue in there as well to get that black color. That's the recipe for making black. I'm not a traditional watercolor artists, I'm self-taught, so I did not go to art school and I have never really mixed black that way, I just usually buy a tube like this, but some people find that using the tubed color can mute their other colors, which can be true. But for today I'm going to be using a little bit of black. Sometimes I might mix it with indigo to make more of a Payne's gray in order to provide that outer space feel. Then last with the paint, we have some white gouache. There are two different options that you can use here. The first is just if you buy white gouache in a tube. Gouache if you don't know, is similar to watercolor in that it's paint that's activated by water, unlike oil or acrylic, but it is opaque. The more water you add to it, the more translucent that it becomes. But it's meant to be an opaque paint activated by water. This is permanent white gouache, designers gouache from Winsor Newton or you can use Dr. PH. Martin's plead proof white. This is typically my paint of choice when I'm trying to paint opaque white things like stars, we're going to be painting today. This is also basically gouache. I usually use Dr. Ph. Martin's because it's slightly more opaque. I don't have to do as many layers to get the effect that I want. But this permanent white gouache from Winsor Newton will work also, so that's the white paint. If you also happen to have a white gel pen, sometimes this is my unit ball signal white gel pen. I often use these two add in some other details of end, but you can do that just as well with white paint, that's up to you. We covered paint, we covered brushes. Next, let's look at paper. When I'm doing final projects or honestly just practicing, I always like to have some practice student grade paper on hand so that I'm not spending my precious and expensive professional watercolor paper on pieces that may end up being recycled. This Canson Montval watercolor paper notebook is one of my favorites to use for practice. It is filled with a 140 pound cold press student grade paper. The professional grade watercolor paper that we're going to use for the final project is also 140 pound cold press watercolor paper. The biggest difference between professional and student grade is what the paper is made out of. As you can see on this front page of this watercolor block. Professional-grade watercolor paper is almost always made of 100 percent cotton and it's acid free where a student grade paper is made from wood pulp, so like a combination of lots of different papery things. One hundred percent cotton paper just absorbs better, it has more texture and it helps make colors more vibrant than student grade paper, which is why it's more expensive. As you can see, I'm using Blick Premier watercolor paper and this is a watercolor block, which means that it's taped or glued on all four sides. For my final project I'm going to paint right on this block and then cut it out with a knife at the end. If you don't have a watercolor block though, I would recommend having painter's tape on hand or a washi tape or some other tape that is nice to your paper, so that I won't rip it up. Anything more adhesive than masking tape or painter's tape will not work. But if you use tape or like I'm using this block to keep the paper down. It keeps the paper from getting warped as much. One of the questions I always get is how do you keep your paper from getting warped or distorted? My answer is it usually always is warped or distorted in some way but having tape to tape it down to a desk or using a water color blocks significantly lessens the damage that water will do to your paper, so that's paper. Next. I always like to have a pencil and eraser and especially for this class because an option for your final project, which again it's optional, you don't have to choose. But I'm going to be drawing like an outline, a silhouette of an object and painting my galaxy inside that silhouette and so using a pencil and an eraser is going to be helpful for me as I draw those guidelines. I always like to have some q tips on hand in case there is some pulling water on the project that I use. You can't really see them here, but I always have two cups of clean water to start with. One of them will probably stay dirty. Then especially when creating galaxies, because utilizing the white space of the paper underneath as well as using water to create swirling effects. Those are both really important techniques where it's pretty necessary to have clean water, not dirty water. I always have a paper towel to the side of me. Some people like to use a sponge, that's just to wipe off your brush in between strokes. Then, especially as we're mixing paint, I like to have this a completely clear mixing pallets so that I can makes my paint beforehand before I start painting my galaxy. Mixing paint before you start painting the galaxy, especially is important because to create super blendy swirls of the galaxy without any harsh dried paint lines requires you to be fast and quick. If you are mixing your paint while you're trying to also paint this galaxy, you are more likely then not going to create paint lines, which is okay and I have some tips for how to make those essentially go away later on the class. But my biggest tip is to mix your colors beforehand as much as possible. I think that about sums it up for the materials portion of this class. If now you want to gather all of your materials, you don't have to use the exact same ones that I'm using obviously. Use whatever you have on hand, but I think it's always helpful to know what I'm using so that you can try to replicate it as closely as possible. Without further ado, let's jump ahead to the next lesson. See you there. 3. Color Theory: Welcome to our color theory recap class. Now if you've taken my beginner's galaxy class already, we have some extensive video on color theory where we created this color wheel, and we talked about the relationship between all of the colors on the color wheel. So I'm not going to go as in depth as I did in that class and I'm not going to create another color wheel, but I will briefly talk about what we went over for those of you who need to brush up on it, or have not taken that class, or would just would like to have an overview of color theory. So basically like I hinted at in the materials section where I said, I am only going to be making the colors of the rainbow using three primary colors. I have here indigo, Permanent Red Deep, and lemon yellow, and then I have black over here for other uses. These three primary colors make all of the colors on this rainbow depending on the ratios of pigment you put together. On this color wheel, where the P's are, are the primary colors. So Permanent Red Deep, lemon, yellow, indigo. Then when I mix the primary colors together in equal amounts, that gets me the secondary colors. So when I mix equal amounts of red and yellow, I get a secondary color, which is orange. When I makes equal amounts yellow and blue, I get green, and when I mix equal amounts blue and red, I get violet. Then when you start messing with the ratios a little bit, so if I have more red than yellow, then I have made what is called a tertiary color. I'm on this color, wheel we named tertiary colors by which pigment is the majority of pigment. So if I mix more red than yellow, so let's say two-thirds red, one-third yellow, then I get red-orange, and that's this tertiary color right here. So it's an orange that's more on the red side than it is on the yellow side, and it's the same thing for all of these other tertiary colors on the color wheel. So red-orange, or yellow-orange are the two tertiary colors between red and yellow, and then yellow-green or blue-green are the two green tertiary colors between blue and yellow, and then red-violet and blue- violet are between red and blue. It's important to know the relationship between these colors, especially when creating rainbow galaxies because you don't want to mix colors together that don't belong. The hardest part about rainbow galaxies is handling all of the different colors on the rainbow in a way so that they mix together beautifully and you're not putting together accents like complimentary colors, which are colors that are opposite of each other on the color wheel, because when you mix complimentary colors together, you create brown. Brown is muddy and glows and we don't want, at least in our vibrant rainbow colors. I've seen some beautiful colors palette, galaxies with a color palette that includes brown, but those are more like a different style. We want to create these vibrant rainbow galaxy, and in order to do that, color theory is going to be really important. So just to show you what actually happens when you mix, or rather, let's start mixing these colors together, because that's what I said we were going to do in this class. So that was like my brief overview of the color wheel, and now we're going to make our colors on this palette using only these three colors, then I'll show you what happens when you mix colors that don't belong. So first, let's name all of the colors of the rainbow. So the way that I like to remember the rainbow from eighth grade science class is ROYGBIV. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. So we already have red, we already have yellow, and we already have, indigo rarely is blue. I like to say that Indigo is like a cross between blue and violet. So indigo is more like blue-violet and then violet as purple when it comes to this color wheel. We already have those three colors, so let's go about making our other colors. So if we have red, I'm going to pull out some Permanent Red Deep and just put a spot under there. That's my red. Now we need orange. To make orange we know that we need to mix equal parts, red and yellow. So to do that, I'm going to take some red. I have, just so you know, I have some of these colors already dried on a separate palette, and I'll show you right here. Today, here's my primary colors palette, but as you can see, it's pretty full of paint. So I'm showing you how to mix it on this clear palette right here. I'm going to take some red and just transfer it onto this palette, and then wash off my red, because I definitely don't want any red to be mixing in my already dried yellow palette. So soon as starts are washed off, I'm going to pick up some yellow in my palette and mix it together. Yeah, because yellow is, I probably should have done yellow first because yellow is a lighter color obviously than red. Be careful not to get red into your yellow palette if you're drawing, if you're using like a dried palette like I'm. So here is, oh, that splattered everywhere but that's okay. Here is my orange. There's my orange color and it's here on this palette. So if I need to make more orange, then all I need to do is mix more red and more yellow, and to that you might say, but Colby, how do I know I'm going to get the exact amounts? What if it's a slightly different shade? My response will be, you don't. Every time you mix the color manually using the primary colors or any other different kind of color, it's going to be really hard to create the exact shade that you want, but luckily for you, for one we're creating galaxies we don't need to always use the exact shade of whatever color we're using because we're going to be blending lots of different colors together, and the whole point is to just have a big swirl of color that all goes together of all different shades and all different colors. So for this particular project, I would not worry about that. So we have red, orange, here's our yellow, again, that's lemon, yellow. To get green, we do equal parts, yellow. So I'm going to drop some of this lemon yellow in this palette. Equal parts yellow. Then it's important to remember when I say equal parts, you want the ratio to be about 50, 50, but some pigments are more pigmented than others, and blue is one of those. When it comes to mixing green with yellow and indigo, I would put a lot of yellow and I would only do a little bit of indigo and go from there because indigo is a pretty strong pigment. That is a little more yellow, green and so I could do a little bit more blue, I think. But I only like barely turfed my brush into the indigo palette on my palette over here. I'm just going do just a little bit more to make it slightly darker. You can get as darker as light as you want. There's my green. Next is blue. We already have blue. One way to get Daniel Smith indigo especially is pretty dark. If you want to be lighter, I think we talk about color value a lot in my classes. In order to get a color to be a lighter version of the most highly pigmented version, you just have to add water. If you don't want your blue that's going to represent blue to be quite as dark. Just add some water to it and it makes it lighter like that. There's blue and now we already have this lighter value of indigo on this pallet and so that's perfect because for indigo, I wanted to make a blue violet and blue violet is a tertiary colors. How do we make this blue color to be slightly more on the violet side? We add just a little bit of red because blue violet is majority blue. We don't need tons of red here in order to get that cooler contrasting color palette that we want. I'm adding just like a tiny bit of red to my blue violet here. It's really watery so it might be hard to see, but that's my blue violet. That looks pretty good. It looks purple. It definitely looks purple, but it's a cooler ton and that's what having a majority of blue will make that shade a cooler ton. Last we need violet, which is equal parts red and blue. On this, I'm going to make a different palette for our violet or straight purple color. I'm adding indigo and remember that indigo is a very powerful pigment. When it comes to creating colors with indigo, you don't necessarily need exactly 50, 50. I ball it in order to get the shape that I want. That's also why I like to use practice paper to create these practice swatches. I have my blue and now I'm going to add my red. I'm going to see how that compares to blue violet down here. It's a little more purple. It's still looks slightly blue, violent to me. I'm going to add just a tiny bit more red. Just a little to make it real, to make it more of like a neutrally purple color. I'll call that good. Then if I were to add more red to it, it would be a much warmer tone and that would be red violet. That is my rainbow. It's also important to remember that as you are mixing these colors together and your galaxy, they're supposed to like swirled together. You're probably going to be creating more and more tertiary and secondary colors as well. Even more shades then you can probably picture with your naked eye right here. That's how you make these colors together. I would recommend before starting mixing lots of these colors. Or rather like mixing these colors and like great portions so that maybe they fill up to even like half of this well, right here. Because while watercolor paint goes along way, it's true mixed watercolor paint because it's mostly water when you're mixing, it tends to be used up a lot faster. I would recommend just mixing up a lot beforehand. Before I move on, some of you might be thinking, do I have to mix it up beforehand? If I were going to be using the wet on wet technique or if we're going to be like mixing them together with water on the paper, aren't they going to just blend together on the paper? To that I say, yes, the primary colors can definitely create these colors by themselves with watercolor, without you really even trying. They're just going to blend together. But because this is a class all about like just starting to do rainbow galaxies, I would recommend having more control over the color by mixing it beforehand just so you can see how it goes. But it's up to you whether or not you really want to mix beforehand or not. I would recommend at least the first few practice tries mixing them up beforehand just so that you know exactly which colors you are putting on the paper, which colors you're trying to mix together before creating this explosion of rainbow space. Because when I have tried, from my experience, when I have tried to make rainbow galaxies and not mix the colors together before the first few times that I did, I got brown a lot or I just did not mix as well as I wanted or other disappointing results like that. But you are not me. You could easily do some, jump steps above while I did when I first started doing these. Again, up to you, but that concludes our section on color theory and mixing colors. I hope this prepares you for what we're going to practice next. In the next video, we're going to go over some water control techniques and using the paper underneath. Then in the videos after that, we are actually going to practice putting all this together to create our rainbow galaxies before moving on to our final project. Without further ado, let's jump ahead. 4. Techniques: If you are taking this class, you likely already know about the wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry techniques because they are probably the most basic foundational techniques for watercolor painting. But just in case you don't, here I'm going to do a quick overview and then I'm going to go more in depth to how specifically we use the wet-on-wet technique to create a galaxy effect. The wet-on-wet technique basically, it describes whether or not your paper is already wet when you start painting. The wet-on-dry technique is when the papers dry, but obviously your brush is wet because it watercolors always wet because it's activated by water and then the wet-on-wet technique is when your paper is already wet and that could be either wet with water or wet with paint which has water in it, but so it could be like clean water on a page or it could be wet with paint already. Then you paint on the wet surface which makes the pain just bloom out like this. The wet-on-dry technique obviously is for more defined paint strokes and the wet-on-wet technique is more to create this blended, ill-defined paint stroke where the paint just goes wherever the water goes. This is important for galaxies because water is how we create the blended, ethereal effect that space has where all the colors are blended together and you're not sure where one starts and where another one begins. I'm just putting a bunch of colors on here to demonstrate that. If you took my beginner's galaxy course, we talk about wet-on-wet a lot and the wet-on-wet technique is the basic foundational technique for two of the three methods for creating galaxies I teach in that class. Again, this is more like a recap course, but I want to go just again before we do rainbow galaxies to focus on how water and specifically how much water we use will determine how effective our blending is. As you can see over here, I say how much water because there's a fine line between not having enough water so that it stops so the paint doesn't go anywhere or having too much water like over here so that it pools and the paint sits on top of the paper instead of actually blending out to where it's supposed to go. Typically you want to have some nice happy middle ground where you can see that the paper is still wet. If you see that the light is reflecting off of paper, that means it's still wet, so you want the paper to still be wet, but you don't want to see drops, pools of water on your paper because that means the paint instead of blending on the paper with the paint that's already there, it's going to just sit on top of this puddle that you've created. If you create puddles, that's okay, that's why I have Q-tips to mop them up. Using water, I use a lot of Q-tips when I create galaxies because I use a lot of water to create the blends that I want to create between colors. For example, let's do a red over here. This is a good example of what happens when my paper is dry on this side of the paper, but it's wet over here and so where my paintbrush had landed on the web paper, now it's blooming out that way. I'm putting red, I'm just going to put red all over on here. Then next to the red before this part dries, I'm going to put some blue next to it. You can see where the red and the blue I've made a little bit of a violet color right there. Now, obviously these colors are blending together pretty well, but for galaxies, we don't want there to be just a straight line where the colors mix together, right? We want them to be swirly and have some texture. That's where you come in with your paintbrush. I don't have any paint on here, this is just water. I'm going to drop some water along the line over here and get this blend moving it. Student grade paper is tricky because the paint usually drives a lot more quickly on student grade paper and not as nicely. When we do on our professional grade paper, it's going to turn out a little bit better, but you see how when I drop water on here, that's a nice natural way to create some texture. Even if I'm not trying to blend specific colors, if I just want to create a swirling texture in a color that's already existing, the water acts as it's pushing the paint out of the way to make room for the paper underneath and that's what creates these moving textures on the paper. That's a technique I often use with galaxies. If I know that I have enough paint on here then I will often just drop some water to help move the blending along that way. Another important thing to note with water is how it can help you use the white paper underneath to help create more of a contrast. I hardly ever use white paint to create white effect, especially in galaxies, I try mostly to use the paper underneath and use water to make the paint more transparent so that you can see more of the paper. I'm going to do a quick demonstration of that. Then we're going to talk more about how to use that effect when we are playing with different colors of the rainbow and how you can make all those different colors blend together in smooth ways. Especially when I'm creating galaxies, in order to let the white part come through to create contrast. I will paint swatch of paint on one side and then I'll paint another swatch of paint on the other side. While these two things are still wet, I will take clean water and just have them meet each other like that. It's not 100 percent white under here, but it's light enough so that you can see there are some texture and you've created some contrast and when you do all of that on a broader spectrum, it looks really cool on the galaxy. That is my little video recap on water techniques and how I use water to create swirling effects on galaxies. In my experience if you are unhappy with your galaxy because you think it's not blendy enough or anything like that it doesn't quite have that galaxy feel, it's probably because you're not using enough water. If you say to me, "But Coli, but the more water I use, the more I ruin my paper." Yes, that's true and that's why it's important to get really high-quality paper when doing galaxies. If you have student grade paper, it's especially important to always use at least 140 pound paper. A 140 pounds just means that when you have a ream of it, which is 500 sheets, that weighs 140 pounds and that you tape the paper down so that it doesn't get warped as much when you put a lot of water on it. But I would also recommend that especially for galaxies, if you're doing a final project, to have higher-quality watercolor paper. For galaxies, I might even recommend having, if you have 300 pound paper on hand, which is a lot more expensive and not everybody has it, that could be good too. It's a lot thicker than normal paper, but water is the key element to creating galaxies, water and layers. If you find the two main complaints with galaxies I have are it's not swirly enough, the colors didn't blend enough together, the answer to that is you didn't have enough water and the colors aren't vibrant enough. The answer to that is either you didn't use the right paper or you didn't use enough layers. We're going to talk about layers later on in this class. Because hint one way to make your colors more vibrant with galaxies, especially as they're constantly being washed out with tons of water and tons of black, is to have more than one layer of color. We're going to talk more about that later on. Finish up practicing your water techniques and let's move on to actually painting with some rainbows. See you soon. 5. Practice: Orbital Style: Okay, so before we get started on our final project, we are going to practice two different methods for creating a rainbow galaxy. The first is what I like to call the orbital method, the orbital style, and that means we're going to create a galaxy that looks a little something like this, where all of the colors of the rainbow go out in order, and they're going to meet outer space, which is the black. But you see there's still some elements of blending here and some nice galaxy swirls going on. But I want to practice this method first because you don't have to, because we're using the colors and order of how they appear on the rainbow. You don't have to worry so much about color placement, which in my opinion is one of the hardest parts about creating rainbow galaxies. Because as we talked about in the color theory portion of this class, it's very important to have a clear view of which colors will blend well together so you don't create kind of muddy brown. As I'm saying this, I'm remembering that I don't know that I demonstrated exactly what it looks like when you put complementary colors together. I'm going to show you right now. Again, complementary colors are colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel. If I was looking for the complementary color of red, this is my primary color, red. I'm looking over here, and it's a secondary color, and it's green. If you're only dealing with primary and secondary colors, a good way to remember which ones are complimentary is by pairing the secondary color with whatever primary color is not used to make it. Because this green is made with yellow and blue, red is the remaining primary color of the three primary colors, and you don't need red to make green. The same goes for violet and yellow, you'll see that violet is opposite yellow because in order to make violet you need red and blue. So blue and orange then are the same in that way. It's nice to make a color wheel so you can see which tertiary colors are opposite each other also, but probably the most important complimentary color combinations that you need to know are the primary and secondary colors, when we are making a rainbow galaxy like this. Just to demonstrate, I'm going to show you what it looks like when I put together a little bit of red. So here's some red, and then I'm going to put just a dab of green and mix that together with red, and I'll show you what I mean by a muddy, gross brown color. Currently the green is like overtaking the red, so I'm just going to put a little bit more red over here. But once you mix these two colors together, you don't get a super cute surprisingly wonderful blend here. It will go from like grungy red to grungy green. Mostly we will maintain this super muddy brown color, which if brown is part of the color palette you're going for, great, but in this class we are going for more of a vibrant rainbow feel for our galaxies, so brown is not included, and this is what we want to avoid. I'm going to set that over here. By first creating an orbital style galaxy like this, we're going to practice remembering the order of the colors so that when we create the next style, which is what I like to call the nebula style, which is more like a space explosions of color all over the page. It won't be as hard term member which color combinations go together. But this is also a fun kind galaxy to make too, it's fun to manipulate shapes in galaxies, and this orbital style is one of the most common, I think. Also important to note is because, you see all of these like blends and bleeds together, we're definitely going to be practicing our water control and using water to push paint to the direction that we want to go. Because the thing that we really don't want, when we're making galaxies especially, is to have very defined lines of color. We want our color even though we're making a circular long shape here, we still want it to look like it's exploding kind of. That makes sense, the colors are going into each other, not in any specific pattern. It's not like we opened up a rock or a [inaudible] and saw very defined lines, we want all of these colors to be blending together chaotically. That's what we're going to go for. First, I'm going to start from the middle and paint outward. When I start with this oblong shape, I like to first get the middle wet in the oblong shape with water. Because I want to leave a little bit of this white for some contrast, I'm going to paint my red, I'm going to start with red and go around it. It's very easy to turn this oblong shape into a circle if you're not careful, so with every layer, just make sure you are maintaining the shape as much as possible, and that means making sure that it's not a circle, that one side is longer than the other. Okay. There's my first little layer with red. I can see some of this is pulling a little bit, but you'll also notice because I started with the middle wet, the red has blended into the middle and this cool texture's forming, that's the kind of thing that we want. Now we need to go quickly because the paint is drying already, and we don't want it to dry too fast. While I'm painting, it's also important to note that I am using scrap paper right now, I'm not using my student grade paper. This is some scrap professional grade paper, because student grade paper is great to practice on, sometimes it's also great to practice on if you have pieces on professional paper that you're not planning to use again, or you are just trying to recycle. This is like the back of one of those pieces that I cut up, and I like to use them for practice as well, so that's what I'm doing right now. Okay, I extended the red a little bit with water, that was that second layer that I did, and now I'm painting my second orange layer. If you are looking at this and thinking to yourself, Colby, the colors are diluting? Yes, they are, we will make sure to continue adding colors so they don't dilute in the future. I've got my orange. If you needs some help remembering the order of the rainbow, just remember ROY G BIV. That's from my old physics days, high-school physics. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, we're skipping indigo and going straight to violet. The order is on the color wheel right here, you just have to go pick a direction, and as long as you stick with that direction on the color wheel, you will be golden. Which is why I like to have it as an aide next to me when I'm doing this. I'm trying to maintain this oblong shape. We did orange and next is yellow. After each layer, I'm painting just a little bit of water to give a little bit of a buffer between the layers. The water often will extend the previous layer's color outward and as we paint more layers, these colors will be more blended together. There's my yellow. It's okay if everything's not exactly perfect right away, because we're treating this as a first layer. If it's not exactly the shape that you want right away, that's okay. As we go along in this practice session, I'm going to continue explaining my tips and tricks for avoiding harsh paint wet, dry paint lines and making sure to get some of those swirly effects. One of those things I'm doing right now is where I have this layer already down but I don't want it to be like, oh, this is my very defined yellow layer so I'm manually with my brush. I'm not putting any paint on it. I'm trying to barely put water because if I put too much water, then it's going to just create puddles. But with a little bit of water, I'm trying to manually blend some of this orange pigment in with yellow over here. That's something that I'm going to keep doing as I continue painting each layer. Painting these layers is also a great practice in water control because if you don't have enough water in the pigment as you put it down, then the paint's going to dry way too fast and it's going to be hard for you to keep up. But if you have too much water, then it could create not beautiful blends and the water is just going to sit in like a pool on the paper so only you can figure out what is going to work best for you. My best advice for finding that sweet spot is to practice. I know everybody hates that but that's really the only way that I've found. Okay, so we have yellow and now I'm going to do a layer of green. I already did my water buffer layer. I'm going to take some green and continue. My shape is starting to look a little circular so I'm going to make sure to make it a little more oblong because I want to keep that oblong shape. Instead of putting more paints, sometimes I'll just grab some water and spread the pigment using the water. This shade, this kind of looks like little rainbow avocado right now. Which could be fun, but not for this class. Sometimes you grab too much pigment and it doesn't quite blend the way that you want it to, or you want a little bit more texture in it and a good way to add more texture is to remember that by adding water, you are creating more contrast because you're letting more of the paper come through and that creates more of a contrast between the colors. After almost all of these layers are done, I'm probably going to go over all of them with water again and add more paint. So keep that in mind as I continue onward here. With my blue layer. First, I'm adding that layer of water. That's partially to try to get rid of these dried paint lines that are on the outside, that are forming on the outside of this of our oblong shape. Partially just to make sure the space is wet enough for our next layer of paint when we actually put it on there. There's that shape. Now I'm going to grab some blue, indigo or whatever blue that you are using. Sometimes I like to use Prussian blue also because indigo tends to be darker. But I'm doing indigo this time. I'm adding my blue layer all around. Not worried about it being clean because clean lines is actually the opposite of what we're trying to achieve with our orbital galaxy. I'm going to extend this layer with water a little bit and make sure I minimize the risk of those dried paint lines as much as possible. At this point before we go to violet, I'm going to also going to manually with water and with paint if necessary. Go through and make sure all these layers are not quite as defined as they naturally want to be. We don't want them to be defined. We want them to be a big mess of color that is loosely in this orbital shape. One way to do that as we've been doing, is with water. Another way to do that is to actually pick up more pigment and add more pigment and manually blend it in this way. You can do that with all of the different layers. I'm going to grab a little more yellow and maybe try to blend in to the green over here. I might get a little thin layer of yellow green, which is great. We want lots of those layers. I can see that my red and orange here are not very pigmented. That's a good place for me to re-wet this space and add a little bit more of those colors. My brush accidentally flipped a lot of color everywhere and that will be fine. We're going to keep going. I'm adding a little bit more orange pigment and then I'm going to add just a tiny bit more red pigment. Also over here. It looks like the white that I tried to maintain is mostly gone away. But that's okay. I'm going to put this red along here and then I'm going to take a little bit of water and dab it just so. It's not going to make the paper completely white again, but it is going to create more of that texture that we were talking about. Okay. Now it looks like a lot of my yellow has disappeared over here. I'm just going to add more of this yellow. This process is honestly just me looking at the painting and figuring out which color needs, like, which layer needs more color and which doesn't. It's not an exact science and you definitely don't have to do everything that I'm doing. Now that we've done that, mostly looks like those orange flex slanted in the blue and the green, so I'm going to add another layer of blue to try to cover up that orange because we know that orange and blue are complimentary colors. Those are not going to blend well together. Sometimes little accidents like that happen, and I do not want brown in this mix. I'm taking more blue, and making this more pigmented. I've put the pigment down. Now I'm taking my brush with water and blending in this pigment with the water, and I might take some green and blend it in that way as well, but for the most part, it should be okay. See how this line right here is pretty defined, even though it's like still blurry, we can very clearly see that it's like a blue layer and a green layer, and we want it to be a little less defined than that. It's not quite a straight line. Then I'm going to add more green. Honestly, this process is just like more water, more pigment, more water, more pigment, more water, and that's a lot of what galaxies are, just in general in my experience. Only two more. We need a layer of violet and then we need black. After we do all of that, then I'll probably go back through and continual manually blending for a bit. But this is basically, the process of creating an Orbital Galaxy. I'm adding more water just to make sure that it's wet enough and I'm going to go in to my violet pigment over here and add it on there. This looks a little more blue violet to me then read violet, that's okay. But I am going to add a little bit more red, and that's a little better, just so we can get a very clear layer of this violet right here. Awesome. Now, just to make sure it's not all like we said before, just like coming from the same space because we want it to be blurry a little bit, I'm going to go through and just dab some of these places with water. Spread the pigment toward in, toward the blue, and this is the fun part of creating galaxies. This is the part where you're just messing around with color and letting watercolor do its things, one of my favorite parks. Last thing is black. I'm just going to add black to fill the page. Because the black is the outer space part, and my oblong shape is still pretty much sideways. That's not too bad. Like I said, it can be easy to accidentally turn it into a circle. If you do want to keep this like sideways orbital shape, make sure that you keep that in mind. I'm quickly adding black so that it can blend in to this violet, and then after I'm done adding black, that's when I'll go through and put finishing touches on the blends for this orbital rainbow galaxy that we've created. I'm just filling this page with black. You've mostly done that. Now, I'm going to go through with water and if there are any spots where I feel like, oh, I don't know whether that's blended really well. It definitely looks like a line. I'm going to go through with water and just make sure a lot of these lines have a little bit more of that fun galaxy texture to them. I might need to add pigment along the way, which is something that we did before. Like up here I see some dried paint lines. Actually, one way to get rid of, or not really get rid of but cover that, those paint lines, is to add a darker pigment on top of it, and that can be a good way, also, to add some additional texture that makes it not quite so stiff of a shape. That's what I'm doing right there with some blue, and then I'm going to do the same thing. Be careful when you're adding pigment not to also add tons of water. Because again, the pigments already activated by water, so if you add more water on top of it, then it's going to be a lot more water than you bargained for. That's a dance that you're going to have to figure out. But I just want to warn you that's something to be careful of. I'm just blending some of these together here, and one way to do that is after you clean off your brush, and you're picking up a different color, is to make sure not to have like, I always wipe it off on a paper towel, before I start going again. Now I'm going to just finish up on these inner layers and will be about done with this orbital galaxy using the rainbow, using the spectrum of the rainbow. Now, my one caution, while it is easier I think to do galaxies like this, because you don't have to think about the order of the rainbow, my one caution is that it's also really easy to make them look uniform and not like galaxies. To make them look more like you're just blending a whole bunch of layers together that are really straight and uniform. If that's your jam, totally go for it. But if you want it, my preference for galaxies is to make them feel more chaotic. Make them feel like they just happen to look like they're in an order, not so much that they're meant to be in that hidden in that specific order, if that makes sense. That's why I'm doing all this manual blending after. Just because that's my preference, I think they look more realistic that way. I think that about sums it up for this lesson. Here is my orbital style galaxy where we had all of the rainbow in one galaxy. It almost looks like a spiral galaxy too. That could be something that you think about. But the way that we did this was just going in order of the rainbow on the color wheel, and we started in the middle and we moved our way outward continually adding pigment and then adding black last. This is the Orbital style. Next, we're going to learn the Nebula style, which is a little trickier in that you have to consciously be thinking about where you put the color as opposed to here. You're going in order so you're not worried about colors not looking well blended together. But I think nebula style is a lot of fun, and it's probably the style that I am going to use for my final project. Without further ado, let us move on. 6. Practice: Nebula Style: Welcome back. If you've been following along, we just created this orbital style rainbow galaxy where we painted all of the colors together in order and used water and pigment and lots of different washes to make sure all these blended together in this nice chaotic galaxy style that loosely resembles like an orbit or a spiral galaxy or something like that. Now we're going to do nebulous style which is more chaotic. That's where it's more like blooms or explosions of clouds of colorful gas in space, which I think is probably the style that you see more often but can be trickier only because you have to specifically think about color placements. With that, I have to just a disclaimer as I'm talking through creating this nebulous style rainbow galaxy. Having access to or just remembering the color wheel and which colors look well together is super important when doing this. It's also very important that you are able to paint and think quickly so that you minimize the amount of paint that dries as much as possible. This instruction is going to be a lot. I guess most of my instruction is stream-of-consciousness. Me just telling you exactly what's happening but it's going to be a significantly less ordered than the orbital style because there's not really much of an order to it. First, for my nebulous style, I mean, you can start with the different colors and go and order with if you want but I tend to think that it looks better if it looks more chaotic and more like an explosion. You can either start with wet on wet so like the whole page is wet before you put the pigment down or you can start wet on dry which is usually the way that I like to start with more control but you do have to go faster to add water to it so you don't get paint lines as fast. First I'm adding a little bit of red over here and the key to this nebulous style is also to remember that there can be multiple layers. With this red, I'm just adding a little bit of water around it before darkening of it in there. I can go either way here if I want purple or orange or yellow or blue. Those are all the colors that go well with red. With red I add a little bit of violet over here. With rainbow galaxies in this nebulous style, I also find it's helpful if you have pockets of color. Not every space has tons of highly pigmented color in it. That's why I like to use water to create more white space. I'm just creating some soft edges around these two colors that are going on right now. I can either continue with the red or I can continue with the purple. I think I'm going to continue with the purple and one color combination that surprisingly works well together in my experience is some shade of green. I'm going to put some green over here that's more of like a dark blue-green, but I want to be careful not to touch the red because remember, green and red are complimentary. One way that I can be sure that they don't touch each other is if in the middle here. I'm going to rewrite this because this has dried. If in the middle here, I make sure to put some buffer color, right? What colors go between red and green that might also look okay with purple. I'm thinking blue would be a great color to put right there. I'm just going to put some blue up in here and that's going to tie the red together with the green and the purple, all without creating a muddy mess so won't let complimentary colors touch each other. Making sure that you know what colors can be a buffer is important when doing galaxies like this. Okay, next we're working with blue and green. Yellow goes well with both of those so I'm going to paint some yellow down here and I'm going to make sure I want some of the yellow to be this real true lemon yellow we have done here and some of it to be mixed up with the colors up there. I'm taking some water after I've put the yellow down and meeting the green and meeting the blue but maintaining some of the yellow. Meeting the green and blue, I mean I'm not starting in any pigment. I'm starting with water and then going upward. I'm not bringing the blue down because that would dilute the yellow. Instead I'm starting on either on the paper or the yellow and moving upward. I got too much water on here. It looks a little bit, so I just mapped it up with a Q-Tip. Now moving forward from yellow and the other colors we haven't used, we haven't used orange, it looks like. I'm going to pick up some orange and I am going to paint below this yellow here. That's my orange. In order to blend these together pretty well, I'm going to add a little bit more yellow over here. Then I'm going to take my water, I have tall brush that holds a lot of water so in order to do this well, you need to make sure that you don't have too much. I'm going to use my water to extend this pigment. Now, in just a second, we're going to keep adding colors, but I want this, in-between those colors, to maintain a little bit of white space. I'm making sure to do that by only painting with water in between those two colors so that it still creates that contrast. As we continue extending this outward, we're going to add black in just a second, but you don't only have to use specific colors in certain places. I know that a great color to go between orange and yellow is red because yellow and red make orange. I'm just going to put a little bit of orange down there and then use water to blend it back in, blend that in nicely right there. Then I think I'm going to extend the yellow. so some yellow goes up here next to this green. Now, I want to be careful not to get too much of that green by that orange because this has a lot of blue in it, so orange by the dark green probably wouldn't look so great, which is why I want to continue extending out this yellow to be a buffer in-between those colors. We have a lot of our initial colors down. Now, the next steps are to add black, first of all, and then to continue blending. Even before we add black, I'm going to take my brush with some clean water and I'm just going to blend a lot of these colors together so that it's not so like this is the orange section, this is the blue section, this is the green section. Because the more blended they are together, the more it looks chaotic like some random explosion happened in space that created this natural beauty. Similar to the orbital version that we just did, that could mean adding more water or it could mean adding more pigment if you've added too much water and it looks like the pigment has diluted. For example, up here it looks like the red has definitely been diluted a little bit. I'm not painting tons of pigment on there, but I am painting enough so that I can go back with water and continue to spread it out and blend it together. So I have enough so that there's lots of pigment over here that I can play with, but that's also enough to be spread out and act as a contrast. Then I might extend the green purple combination up here a little bit. If you were silly like me, this is another reminder to make sure to mix your colors beforehand, otherwise you're having to waste precious time mixing them right now, which is what I'm doing. I'm adding some green up here and into here. You can dot some of these colors into color areas where you know that they're not going to look bad. That's another good way to blend and add some chaos. Then I'm just going to pick up some violet over here and extend some of that maybe to bleed into some of these other color combos before taking water and blending all these together. That mostly looks pretty good. Now we're going to add black around the edges and some black in the middle. You don't necessarily have to add black in the middle, but it's one of my favorite ways to have space be intruding on colors sometimes, if that makes sense. I didn't leave tons of space for black on the edges, but that's okay. This is practice to get the hang of this nebula style of galaxy. If you want, probably all of the galaxy styles we learned in the beginner's class, most of those were nebula style where it's an explosion of color wherever you are. I just find it harder to do it with rainbow because you constantly have to be thinking. I have that frame of black, and especially down here in places where it's clear that the orange is dried already and the red has dried, be careful not to just paint black over the pigments that you have. If I started black here and started painting upward, I would just paint all that black. One way to avoid that is to start with water in the middle of the dried spots, and I've said this lots of times but I'm going to say it again, to start with clean water in the middle of the dried spots and meet the wet paint where it is so that for the most part, it stays there. Then if you find that the more water you add, the more diluted your colors are, that's okay. We can continue to add pigment afterward. We can take off water and add more pigment to make it look more natural looking. That's not too hard to do. I'm going to do the same thing with this red that I did with the orange over there, just so it looks a little more natural looking. Then we're going to manually add more black in the middle and make sure that it intrudes in some of these spaces because that's what space does. A lot of this water, it looks like it has definitely diluted the pigments, so I'm going to add more. You can change brushes if you want, if the brush you're using is becoming too unwieldy, like maybe this one is, maybe I should change, then feel free to switch it up. But I'm going to try to blend some of this red together with the black and still leave some contrasting spaces. At this point, I am going to switch to my number six brush just so it's easier to control the water flow on the pigments. I'm also going to add more orange pigment over here as I blending in with this black. One of the reasons why a lot of watercolorists like to mix their own black or use a darker color in place of black is because black, when added to a color, often dilutes it in a specific way. If that's the case for you, it might be, I would recommend trying to mix your own black. I think I might do a Skillshare class with that exact experiment later on. But for now, one way to try to avoid having the black diluted into whatever colors you're using is to just make sure that you aren't pushing the black out further than you want it to. That requires, as I said, starting where the black isn't and moving it to where the black is so that you're meeting the black where it is as opposed to pushing the black where you don't want it. That bottom part looks pretty good. What I'm going to do is just take a little bit more black and make it intrude on a cloud over here. See it makes sense. I'm leaving some pockets of color but I think it looks cool when the black or whatever color you are using for space ventures out into where the color is, so and then I'm just going to make sure it's all blended together nicely, and that's what I'm going to keep doing for this nebula piece. Now I'm moving up to this more yellow, blue area when I add water it gets diluted so what I'm going to do is add more pigment once I've added water to this area that I knew was yellowish, and this count is like a second layer of pigment, and it's one of the solutions to when your paint dries faster than you can paint is just to paint over what you've painted again using basically the same method. I painted more wet blacks, and now I know that black is pretty wet and I have that yellow there. Now I just need to make sure I have the blues there and the reds. I've added more blue and then I want to make sure that blue blends in really well with the yellow, so it's not quite so stark, and in between we're going to get some green in here because that's what happens when you mix together blue and yellow. I'm just dotting with some water like I've talked about in the past, and I'm extending the blue over here, and now I'm going to take some red and water and extend the red to meet the black so that the harsh edges of the black aren't quite so harsh, and the same goes with the blue. Now this is probably a good space where I can add a little line of black to this black over here turn to brown, so I'm going to add a little bit more black. Then I'm going to add black again up here, and going to continue moving over here so that I can blend more of this violet color. If you're painting along with me, hopefully you can tell and understand by my silence if you're not, that sometimes these galaxies really are just like putting out fires or I've heard that you may land at least the way that I do them and maybe there's a better way. Again, I am a professional artist, I do get paid to do this. This is my full-time job, but I did not go to art school, I did not learn from professional galaxy painters, I learned how to do this by teaching myself and testing out different theories and different methods, and figuring out the methods that work best for me and for galaxies this trial and error method is the one that works best for me so that's why I'm teaching it to you my way. That's probably one of my favorite things about Skill share is, I'm sure there are lots of other artists on here that can teach you about galaxies, and if my way isn't your jam then maybe somebody else's will be, and because you have access to all the classes you can find lots of different methods that might work for you. As I was talking, I'm just doing the same thing over here that I did in all the other sections which is rewet the places that needed to be blended better, and add more pigment as needed. Now while it's still wet I'm going to extend the black a little bit more along the edges. I might even need it to meet this black section that I had over here. I'm extending the black just so it looks more like outer space, and that's how you do the nebula style of rainbow galaxy. Finally, as with all galaxies, I go through with water and or pigment to blend in the places that I think are a little too harsh looking. Like right here maybe I want this to be blended in a little bit more, and I often do that just by dabbing with my paintbrush so that the watercolor can just do what is best at when it's wet. That's the best part about the wet on wet technique is when you use enough water that the paint can do its own thing but not so much water that it's just like wild and chaotic and ruins effect, then you can create magic and it's pretty cool. Those are just the finishing touches on this, and then last I would put stars, but that is the next lesson. That's nebulous style of painting, this is the style I'm going to be using for our final project, which will be to choose a silhouette of an object and paint a galaxy inside the silhouette. I hope that listening to my inner monologue while I'm painting really helped solidify some things. If you still have questions after watching any of these tutorials, feel free to post them on the discussion board and we can talk about them, and when it comes to classes like this also if you have other suggestions or if there's something you'd really like to see in person, post on the discussion board and I may add another section of this class based on your feedback. That's the nebulous style while this is still wet because you need it still wet in order to complete the stars. I'm going to go ahead and talk about the final, final touch of galaxies, which is of course creating some star and lots of stars is the goal. Let's move on and I will see you there. 7. Practice: Stars: If you joined me from our last lesson, which is creating this nebulous style rainbow galaxy. You'll know that I really prefer to create stars, to start the process, while the paint is still wet on the galaxy. While this nebulous style paint is still wet, it's imperative that when you use the white paint to create the stars, that you have access to clean water. If you watch my beginner's class, this is going to look very familiar but I'm going to go over it again. I like to have between 1-3, what I call, gleaming stars or dazzling stars, stars that look like they're glowing off of the page. To create that effect, you need to use the wet on wet technique, and so that means that the paper still has to be wet when you create these stars. I like to do them somewhere off to the side usually, so I want to make sure the paper's still wet. But basically, before I even paint the star or the shining parts of the star, I'm going to create what looks like the glowing light of the star first. I'm taking this white gouache, I'm activating it with a little bit of water. I'm using my round number zero brush, and on this wet paper, I am just touching this gouache onto the paper. I want the gouache to blend in with its surroundings because that will create more of that shining effect. Because I want it to blend pretty seamlessly, I'm going to be putting lots of different layers. It's like, you add water, you got clean water in order to blend in the gleaming parts to its surroundings. But then that dilutes the whiteness, and so you have to add more white and then you have to add more water, and it's just like this process. Now I don't want to make it too big, I've been trying to hone in on how I prefer to make these kind of stars, the past few weeks because everybody can always get better. That's been my goal, is to make them more real, as realistic as possible. I don't want my circle to get much bigger than that. But you want it to be pretty white in the center because you want it to look like the stars disappearing in the light basically. Then the further out where it gleams, that's where it's more translucent, where the shining parts of the light are. I don't want to necessarily see this white dot, but I want it to be hard to tell where it's the very whitest and when it starts to gleam outward, if that makes sense. I'm going back and forth, and back and forth, and that looks pretty okay to me. A lot of my paper has dried, if you want to rewet, to make other stars which can be fun. One cool way to get a gleaming star is to splatter stars while the paper is still wet. I'm not going to rewet this whole thing, but I'm just going to rewet a part of it, to show you what I mean. I'm finished with that portion of my star and I'm going to finish it once it's all dry. But I'm just going to rewet part of this galaxy, and show you what happens when you splatter stars onto the page when it's already wet. Because splattering, if you've seen any of my other classes that includes stars, is my favorite way. When I splatter stars on to paper that's already wet, the stars have this cool blendy effect that I really like. I like to do that as well, and on my final project I will do that. But for this purpose where I'm just showing you how to create these gleaming stars, we're going to leave it there. This is going to take about, maybe five seconds, so bear with me as I, this is an embossing heat tool that I use to, because I'm impatient, that I use to dry my layers in between. I'm just going to use this heat tool to dry my paper, and because for the next layer of stars, I need my paper to be dry. We're going to be using the wet on dry technique, for the remainder of the stars, and I think that's good. Just like I splattered on this portion of the paper, now we're going to do a layer of splattered stars, in order to complete this star effect. We're going to do splattered stars first, and then I'm going to paint in the rest of that gleaming star in the corner up there. The thing to remember about splattered stars is, if you don't have enough water activated in your paint, then the paint is not going to leave your brush. But if you have too much water, then you're going to get huge stars that look more like snow, it's going to come off way too much. Sometimes it's nice to have scrap paper on the side to test it out, so I'm just going to test it on this orbital style that we did before and it looks pretty good. I'm going to go with that ratio and with about what that looks like. I like to use my lid of my Dr. Ph. Martin's bleed-proof white as a mini palette, for our stars. I'm just going to splatter a bunch of stars, and the way that I do that is by holding the paint brush on its handle with my whole hand, and using my other whole hand to hit it really hard. By hit it really hard, I mean, hit it really hard, I don't mean tap. You can tap but you're not going to get nearly as many stars that way. Another frequent question I get asked is, how you do it so it's not so messy? My answer is, it is messy, my desk is always messy, and I always have to wash it with a wash cloth after I'm done every day. But luckily, gouache is washable, and especially if you wash it off right away, it's a breeze. I don't really know of a way to splatter stars that's not messy. But for stars, I usually do way more, I'm going to stop there, but I usually do way more layers than this in order to get it look more deep. Like there are tons of stars, especially when I'm doing galaxies like this. But for the gleaming star, the very last step is to create very thin lines, that are in this gleaming star shape, and you want the middle of those lines to go right where it's very whitest in the middle of that dot, and you want your lines to be as thin as possible. I'm going to with my paint, I'm going to get some white paint, and then I'm just going to brush it on to the palette so it takes off some of the initial paint, so I barely have any paint on there. Then I'm barely going to use any pressure when I paint these lines. If it makes you more comfortable, you can get a ruler to make them super straight, I know a lot of people who do that. I'm just going to eyeball it for now and it might go through wonky, but that's something that you can do. I'm starting up here, and I'm going very thin, it's a little wonky, but that's okay. I'm going very thin across the middle of this star, so thin and parts I can't tell if my paintbrush is actually touching the paper. Because if it's too thick, it's going to look a little weird in my experience. I want as thin of a line as possible, and I'm going to do the same thing as I'm crossing. Right here, as thin on the line as possible. If you want, you can stop there, or sometimes I like to do two little lines across like that, and there you go, that's my gleaming star. So bright you can see it from far away. Then on the outer edges is where you can see it radiating outward. That is the star tutorial and super easy. That was probably mostly a recap of the beginner's galaxy one if you watched that. If you had to watch this twice, thank you. I hope it was just as fruitful a second time. But if not, we have all the tools now to move on to our final project, so let's get started. Gather all of your things and it's going to be a lot easier I think if you paint this one along with me, if you haven't been already. I will see you in the next video. 8. Final Project: Choose a Silhouette: Welcome to Part 1 of creating our final project for these rainbow galaxies. Just to recap, we have learned how to create a rainbow galaxy in this orbital style and in this nebulous style. Now it's up to you to decide which style that you want to use for your final project. One of my favorite ways to use galaxies is to use them as filling or like some inside of a silhouette. In this chapter, we are going to talk about choosing what silhouette you want to use and how you find it. The first thing to remember about choosing a silhouette to use is that it should be a pretty simple shape, something that's easy to draw, sketch or if you have a light pad or if you want to trace it, then you can do that too. I like to use like mountains or trees or something that has a simple shape. For this piece, I thought another fun shape to do would be a planet. What I did was I pulled out my iPad and I just Googled Saturn silhouette stock clip art. It's important, especially if you're going to be posting anything, not to use a silhouette that's copyrighted, not to use a silhouette that is owned by a specific artist, but if you do make sure you tag them/ask permission. I like to pull up Stock images because Stock images for clip art, that's what they're there for, for people to use. I pulled up Stock images of Saturn and I like something like this. I'm not going to copy this exactly, but this general shape just helps me get the silhouette that I want. I'm going to put this off to the side and use my pencil and eraser to draw this silhouette of Saturn. It looks like Saturn it's like a circle and then it has a ring around it. It's a pretty recognizable shape. When drawing circles, I like to use this handy dandy bowl that I have that gives me perfect circles every time. I'm going to put this bowl and just draw lightly in pencil around this circle. That's the planet part. Now, because I want it to be tilted like it is here, I'm just going to estimate how that's going to go. We're going to draw a ring around Saturn and I'm going to mentally remember where this goes, finish the ring around Saturn like that. I want there to be some space to clearly be a ring. When I'm tracing, I'm not a natural draw or sketcher person, so I'm just going to talk through how I think through these things. To finish off the ring, to get this space in here, it looks like on the sides over here are smaller in width, from the top of this ring to the top of this ring. That's going to help me to form the middle here to make it look like the same depths effect that it has here. I'm just going to make sure I have like smaller widths right here. Maybe I want it to even be smaller than that. That it has an angle going on and it does not have to be perfect. That's probably my number 1 piece of advice if you're like, "But I'm so terrible at drawing." I was too, I was terrible at painting and I was terrible lettering, and I was terrible at all of those things that actually I do now to make money for my family. The only way that you're going to get better at something is if you try and look at it, not as something that's impossible, but as something that's actually very doable. There's my Saturn. It is not perfect guys, it's pretty standard looking. I'm just going to erase the pencil lines that I don't want. Actually, that's a pencil line I do want. I want that one. It's these ones that I don't want. I'm not going to have any spaces in between them. This isn't exactly, obviously it's not like an exact copy. I just use this Stock image to get a basic shape for what I want my silhouette to look like. Another way to make your pencil lines even lighter is if you have a kneading eraser. A kneading eraser is an eraser except it's not quite so firm as this other eraser that I was using so you can like kneed it onto your paper and it lifts up the lead as you go. Because we're mostly using dark colors, I'm not going to use a kneading eraser, but in case you're wondering, this is a kneaded eraser from Faber-Castell. I have one that I use already just for anti-gravity, so it's not on hand. That is how I like to sketch things beforehand and then still use the sketch without having very many pencil lines show underneath watercolor. Because sometimes when you paint with watercolor, you can't erase the pencil underneath and that can be tricky. That's the sketch of my silhouette. Now the next step is to paint the rainbow inside. Let's move on to the next video. 9. Final Project: Layer One: This is the second video of our final project, and we have decided on a silhouette. We've sketched it out on our watercolor paper. Now there's nothing left to do but paint the rainbow galaxy inside and decide if you want to do orbital or nebula style. I think both look really cool inside silhouette. So all up to you. I'm doing nebula style, so this video may feel similar to the nebula style video that we did before. But if it's helpful for you to listen to my process, then please feel free and continue watching. I'm just going to paint my rainbow galaxy on the inside like we did before. I'm going to start with red, and thinking about what colors blend well with red. I'm going to first use water to extend my red pigment a little bit, give me a little bit of a buffer as I move on to other colors. I'm going to move on to a yellow, paint some yellow up here. Some of it can be touching the red, it's not like its staying in its own space. Then on the other side of this red, I'm going to pick up some violet. I'm doing different order this time if you'll notice, so not the exact same order as the orbital, I mean as the nebula lesson that you may or may not have already watched. But the key as I'm painting this is to remember which colors blend together well and which colors don't. As I'm painting, extending these, I also want to be careful for paint lines. I know that I painted this yellow a while ago, so I want to extend these lines out so that they're not quite so stark as I paint over them. I know that blue would probably be a pretty good color to put right here between violet and red and even extended over two yellow because yellow and blue make green. Now, if you're smart, which sometimes I am and sometimes I'm not, you remembered to mix your secondary colors ahead of time so that you didn't have to mix them on hand. But if not, no worries. You're just going to have to move a little quicker. I'm trying not quite to go to the edges of this silhouette yet, because the key to making a good silhouette with a space in the middle is to have really crisp edges. I'm trying not to hit the edges quite yet. One color that I know could go between yellow and blue is green, so let's pick up some green over here. It's a darker green right here. That's okay. I'm going to quickly re-wet this and extend this out. Then I'm going to put some lighter green over there as well. I need to quickly mix some lighter green and I'm going to put some light green going up in here. I don't want the green to touch the red, but I can touch the yellow and the blue as much as it wants, so there's some green. Now I want to get some orange and I want to get some right in here because I actually really like orange and purple together. We just don't want the orange to touch the blue. That's something we definitely don't want. To get orange back, I'm going to hurry and mix some red and yellow. It's an orange red. That's okay. When I'm mixing purple with orange and red, I do want it to be more on the red side than on the yellow side. Why? Because purple and yellow are complimentary colors. We don't want purple and yellow to touch, but it's perfectly okay for purple and orange to touch and for orange and yellow to touch. You'll see along here, I'm being very careful along the edges and we're going to paint some black alongside there too. Now, I have most of the colors of the rainbow on here, but I'm just going to continue painting with other colors that suits my fancy. I extended that grain with some more blue, and I think I'm going to make sure I have more violet. First of all, because it looks like the orange may have diluted the violet over here, which is fine. But then I'm going to push for a little bit more over here. I know that violet sometimes can look okay with green. Now, I'm going to paint some black. Then on the outer, we'll extend some of the colors to go on the outer rim as well. I'm going to get my black. Other artists might have more of a rhyme or reason to how they do these kinds of paintings. I often don't. That's the way things are with me. I just go for it and then blend it together as necessary afterward. I'm being very careful around the edges, I do a lot of galaxies and circles like this, and this is how I get the dark around the edges. I am just very careful. This is also why I think it's important to use professional paint brushes because you can get some really crisp lines with the bristles that way. Because they're made to hold up longer and they're made to hold their shape longer, so that is something that I would highly recommend. But you can always paint beautiful things with whatever you have. That is also a mantra that I like to hold too. We're just finishing painting the edges up around here, and we don't necessarily have to paint black all the way round. This nebula thing. This nebula style galaxy can also be blooming outside of Saturn. I am going to paint black on the inside a little bit and then I'm going to blend that together with pigment. Black goes much better when it's with darker, cooler pigments. I'm going to try not to hit this yellow over here as much as possible, just because I think that it can muddy it a little bit. We're going to try not to do that. But now that we've painted the black, let's see if we can blend it in a little bit better with its surroundings. There's black, I'm mixing it with orange and some red, and continually taking off some pigment and getting more water. The places where I've put black already, I am just putting water right on top of it so it starts to blend in and it doesn't get stuck where it is because that could look awkward. Again, I'm taking off the pigment of my brush, using water to blend in this black. Don't want that to dry. Well, I'm noticing it so I'm just going to paint that really quick. One of the coolest parts about Galaxies is when you have little pockets of color so that's why it's fun to have black everywhere. Because when you have black everywhere by default, it creates little pockets of color where the black isn't. Some of this has pulled, you see this line of black has ventured into this orange. Don't want that. It starts to look green and muddy when you mix black and orange together. I do want this to be more blendy right here where the yellow is, but instead of blending in with the black because yellow is such a pale color, I'm instead going to take some of this yellow pigment and blend it up to be where the black is. Some of it is going to get a little muddied, that's okay. Another way to achieve that is because I've just use this big brush to take my Q-Tip and mop up some of this color that also helps blend it together a little bit. I'm very carefully trying to blend this black. It looks pretty even. It looks nice and blended with this yellow which is tricky, as I mentioned before, because yellow is so much of a light color that often gets diluted. I'm also seeing some dried paint spots over here. Where are those paints spots have dried, I'm going to go ahead and paint with just a little bit of water to make them not so dry. In places where it looks like black has diluted the color to so much that I don't like, I'm going to add more pigment. First, I'm going to mop up some of this black because it looks like I had a little bit too much there and now I'm going to add more violet, more blue, more red, more green. All of these other colors that I want to be really vibrant amidst the black. I'm just going to add even more of them. I'm adding more green here. Again, make sure to have your Q-tip handy in case you add a little bit too much water. I'm just about done with this middle part here and the reason I keep dabbing like that is so that I can get this really nice blended effect. I have some pooling up here, I'm dabbing away with my Q-tip. Most of my orange has disappeared so I'm going to add a little bit more. Just a little more blue and violet and I think we'll be done with the middle part and then we'll move on to the outer rings. Silence when painting can be so nice. Okay. That mostly looks pretty good, there's still some pooling. As you can see, the pooling is because my paper is a little warped. Even when I have this paper block with Galaxies is just always going to be at least a little bit warped. There are some places I want to blend a little bit more, like right here where this red and green are meeting. Red and green are complimentary colors. So I'm going to add just a little line of indigo in between and then blend it in with water because I know that indigo goes well both with red and with green. But I want to be careful that it doesn't touch the orange so I'm not dabbing it up. Instead I'm dabbing it more down into the side over here. That creates a buffer between the green and the red. If it gets too dark, then I'm just going to dab it up and use water to blend it more together and create more of that spacey texture. For the most part though, this looks pretty spacey. I'm just going to extend this a little bit outward. Before I move on to the rings where we're going to add color to the rings, I'm going to add stars and because the paper is still wet. In the next video we'll talk about the rings. But for now I'm going to splatter some white stars and maybe lay the foundations for dazzling ones. Actually that will be the next video. The video after, we'll be finishing the rings. Let's move on to the next video, keep this paper wet and I will see you so that we can create some stars. 10. Final Project: Layer Two: We want to create the first layer of stars while this paper is still wet, like we talked about with the gleaming stars. First I'm going to mop up any puddles because puddles are the exact opposite thing we want, especially when creating gleaming stars. You decide how many you want, I would recommend no more than three, but at one gleaming star. Sometimes I like to do one gleaming star, and then some shooting stars too. The shooting stars will be in the next video as we finish our rings layer and do the dried parts of the stars. For now we're going to do the wet part of the stars. I'm going to put a gleaming star. I like to do them sometimes like in the corner and the middle, so I think I'm going to end where it's dark too. I'm going to do one like right there. I've put down some paint and now I'm just going to blend that paint with water to its surroundings. Then I'm going to wash off my brush because by painting in this wet paint, in this dark paint, I have picked up some more pigment. Each time I want to paint a little bit more, I have to wash off my brush in between, because this is white paint, if I don't wash it off in between it's just going to make this, I'm just going to have a tinted version of whatever color I picked up. A tint is when you add white to a color in color theory. Creating these gleaming stars is just going back and forth and back and forth blending so that you create not too big of a brightness ring around where the star is, but so that it's gradually getting lighter and in the middle is where it's the very very lightest. I'm going to stop right there. I think that's pretty good. Then I'm just going to do one gleaming star I think but I'm also going to splatter. With this splatter while it's still wet, it's okay if you have a little too much water because we liked those blended stars. I'm going to splatter some of this paint on here while it's still wet. Some of the stars that we create this way are going to stand out and some of them are going to blend in with the paint a little more and that's okay. Really what that does is create depth. It gives the effect that there are stars that are farther away than others. For the ones that are bigger that have a ring around it, it just is going to create smaller gleaming stars that we don't have to create manually. So that's the first layer of stars. We've created this first layer of stars and we're going to do the second layer of stars after everything is already finished you're over here with the rings. Let's move on to the next video where we're going to finish the rings and we are going to finish the stars. See you then. 11. Final Project: Layer Three: All right. We have these stars. This is still wet a little bit. I'm going to focus on the rings right now. I know that I have this black right here and I have a little bit of a paint line but that is okay. I'm going to try to get rid of that paint line as much as possible and I mostly did that for now. Now, I'm going to paint more color. We don't have to fit the whole rainbow on here, so I might pick two or three colors that I know are going to look really good together and that might even look good blended into this purple right here. I know that red and orange and yellow are only up there, so I think I might do that color combination down here. I know that where both red and orange can look pretty cool next to purple. I'm going to do a little bit of red right here. Then I'm going to put in a little bit of orange next to the red and blend that in with the purple. I'm leaving the outsides free so I can put some black in there if I need to. Now this orange that I have that have created on this palette is very watery, so that's something to keep in mind to when you mix colors is they tend to be a little watery, which is fine. I put orange right there and then I'm going to put yellow outside right here. My yellow is a little bit watery. I'm mopping up some of this because I don't want to be super watery. The nature of using this number 12 brush might switch over to my six because the number 12 just hold so much water. To get this a little more diluted and pigmented, I'm going to use my number 6 brush, and continue painting this up here. It looks nice over there, similar to overhear, we don't have to have the edges all be black. I'll probably have edges be black over here where the red is because red looks pretty good with black but on these edges, I'm going to keep them this colorful scheme, and just by dabbing a little bit, I'm creating the same texture that we move to use the black and on the inside. I'm going to take some black and go ahead and mix, finish it off here. Using my number 6 brush and then I can go back and manually blend it after I'm finished with all that. I'm going to pick up the black again right here. That looks pretty good over there, like a fiery Saturn's ring. I'm going to dab the black to mix it in with this red. I'm going to add a little bit more red I think to down over there. Over there is right here. Just to make it a little more pigmented. Then I'm going to blend this orange and with yellow a little bit more as well, so that it looks nice and blended. No really stark lines that don't look quite as seamless as everything else. That looks pretty good for that ring, and usually with this work, I just go until I'm ready to stop, and then I move on. Let's move on to the second ring. Since, we did like a red, yellow, orange combo over here, let's maybe do a purply blue combo over here, which could look cool, contrasted, I think black coming in both of these or maybe black coming in here and then the blue and the purple next to the green could look really cool. I'm going to start this with a little bit of black. I am wanting like violet and blue on this side and maybe some dark grains. A compliment what's going on over here, so I'm adding just a little bit of violet extending the black over here. It looks really dark and then adding some blue maybe this time I'll have the bottom be the color and not have the bottom be black, but I'll have the top be black, adding some blue over here and then I'm going to add red to this violet that I've created, so it's not quite so dark. It might be more of like a red violet color, which is pretty cool especially for space, and very carefully with my paintbrush extend that over. I like to create some contrast. It's also good to use water to move the pigment so that you can have lighter values of the colors as they blend together. I'll do that down here before I put black on here again. Now I will take some black and finish up this ring very carefully, staying within the lines of the pencil lines that I drew. Then I'll go back after I've gone with new lines to manually blend what needs to be blended together. I'm also looking over here. It looks like this part of the planet cheated a little bit more right there. I'm going to take my water and just dab again, like I've done all over, across the rest of the painting to blend these pieces together. That looks pretty good. I finished the rings, I finished the planet, now, I am going to splatter some stars and finish up with a second layer of stars I think I'll do that in the next video, and that will be the end. We're almost done. Homestretch. See you soon. 12. Final Project: Layer Four: Last layer. Now all of my layers are dried. If you are looking at this first layer, even before you do the stars and you're noticing that some of the colors might not be as vibrant as you want. One option that you have is to do the second layer of the whole thing again, and just put the colors in the exact same spot. That's definitely something that I do sometimes. This time I'm just going to go straight for the stars. We've already done our wet layer of stars. Now whether it's dry, I am just going to splatter on my final layer of stars and then also paint that last gleaming star and maybe painting some comets. First things first, I'm going to pick up my paint. It looks like not very many stars were coming off. That means I don't have enough water because it means the paint is wanting to stick to my paintbrush when that happens. I'm going to splatter my stars. I'll do that a few different times. Honestly, I sometimes will do this like 15 or 16 times. I like, especially when I'm doing outer-space, I like to have a lot of stars. The stars are going to show up more where it's black or dark. That is something good to remember. Those are good places to concentrate. Your stars as it's tricky to actually control where the splatter goes. But as much as you can, I would put the splatter where it's darkest. That is that. That looks pretty good to me. Last but not least is to add the final details. That is going to add the star part of this gleaming star that I have right here. Again, I am painting very thin lines, as thin as I can get them. I'm barely touching my paintbrush to the paper, barely at all. We want to go as straight as possible. You might even use a ruler. I'm not because sometimes I'm too lazy. I'm doing a cross I'm doing another cross. There's my gleaming star. Now, I'm going to add a few comets along the way. For comets, I'm going take a gel pen. You don't have to use a gel pen, you can definitely use a paintbrush to do this too. I'm going to take a gel pen and just swipe a little bit like that. Maybe do one up here. It's fun to have, when you're doing like filling a silhouette, to have the same. Feel like its existing even if a silhouette didn't, so to have someone of these shooting stars go off of the page. That's something I like to do sometimes. There you go, all done. You have completed your final project for this rainbow galaxy class. Thank you for joining me. I hope you had a great time, as much fun as I did. Please join me for the recap where we talk about how you can share your work and where to post your work. I'm on Instagram. My handle is this writing desk. If you post your work on Instagram and tag me, then I'll try to do features once a week about. If you post your project on the projects gallery, I would love to be your biggest fan and to cheer you on and provide feedback if you want it. Those are some places and we'll talk about more in depth. We'll talk about those more in depth in the projects gallery. But for now, give yourself a pat on the back. You have finished. See you soon. 13. Recap: Thank you so much again for taking my class, all about rainbow galaxies. If you painted along with me, you'll have a final project that looks a little something like this. I hope that you'll post it to the project gallery, so that all of the other students, and I can just be your biggest cheerleader and tell you how well you did. If you really loved this class, the most helpful thing that you can do for me is to leave a review. Leaving reviews and having more views helps more students on Skillshare find my class, this class and others like it. If that's something that you want to do, I encourage you to do so. Please give me honest feedback, so that I can know how to make these classes better in the future. If you also love this class, and this is your first one you've taken from me, I have lots of other classes on Skillshare. A lot of them are centered on wilderness painting, painting forests, mountains, stuff like that. I would love to have you join me in those classes as well. Last thing, if you decide that you just love your work so much that you want to share it, a, post in the project gallery because then me and all of the other students can comment on it and tell you how well you did. But, b, I'm on Instagram, my handle is this writing desk. If you post your artwork and tag me, I try to do weekly features of all my Skillshare classes, and I may just choose yours to put my Instagram stories. But if not, I will most definitely give you a like and show you some encouraging words because, I just love to see all the beautiful art that everyone creates after these classes. Thanks again, and I hope to see you next time.