Watercolor starry sky tutorial!

Some of artists recognize watercolor as graphics art material, someone still prefers to think it is all about painting. There's a plenty of reason to argue about ways to use watercolors, but today I want to show how to get fun experimenting with it<3

Before we start, here are some useful rules for using watercolors:

- not to mix more than 2 dyes if you want to keep your colors bright!

- not to use fully dence colors immediately after beginning of drawing - let it begin with diluted with water tints, - you can add brightness or darkness with second layer of dyes;

- not to make more than 3 layers of colors to not get your colors and paper dirty.

That's all for now, let's start painting starry sky!

Here I will tell you about 3 easy ways to make night sky texture:

1. Grainy watercolor

The easist way to make night sky texture is to paint it jwith just an usage enough of water and moving from light colors to dark, laying colors until it's not dry, like this:

2. Second way is a salt! Regular fine salt can absorb some water with watercolors in it, leaving nice sparkling texture after drying.

This way has some peculiarities:

- It looks better with bright transparent colors;

- with this technique water drying is longer and you shouldn't take away salt from paper until it happens.

3. Alcohol.

Alcohol can repel water with dye, and after drying its light and dark spots can't be corrected. If you dip small brush into alcohol and try to make a spot or line on paper while your color is still has wet you will see wide light stripe. But a flaw of this technique is the fact until water dry this stripe will become less noticeable, but still leave light spot.

Feel free to experiment with different alcohol mediums - as more liquid has alcohol in it as stronger impact will be and every effect will look unique (but not hurt your liver, drawing with alcohol is more useful than just drinking it^^). I used vodka.

Here's what I got:

- water technique requires some skill level so if you want to begin with it you should be prepared for the fact it can won't turn beautifully on first try, so be patient.

- salt can make your sky pale, but will give unique sparkling texture instead. It will looks nice on both bright fairytale and lovecraftian horror art. 

- alcohol technique is the least predictable way, but it can provide a really magical effect of galaxies and nebulas.

In the end, you can add stars - with gouache or acrylic paints. It will be better if yous stars will remain lighter than background, so I recommend using white, leaving color to watercolor background. You can spray it with your brush, knocking one brush with paint on it on another (it is fun, you really should try it^^), or with toothbrush. But also you can just paint your stars giving them different shapes and size - it is a good way if you want to draw constellations. In this way you also can try to use metallic paints - your art will be able to get a real celestial vibes if you make some effort^^.

So I got these:

P.S. Watercolor is a very expressive material, yet rebellios. But if will be patient and show some love to it, it will make a realmagic for you. Good luck!