Hello lovely people and welcome. I have
just finished Inktober and so I am a
little bit tired of precise line work
and black and white. So for today I'm
going to riff off of a painting I did
from a tutorial a while back. And the
tutorial is by youtuber by the name of
makoccino, and I'll link that in the
description. And this middle panel of a
nebula is what I'm gonna work from. I'm
gonna do a bigger, full-page
one and I think that'll be a nice
rebound from Inktober.  So I'm starting
with a hot pressed watercolor paper
which is smoother because I don't want
the texture of the paper to pick up. I
want it to be much more smooth. And this
is a nail polish dotting tool, and I'm
going to use that to put artist's masking
fluid on the paper and dots across much
of the paper to keep these stars.
After that dries I'm going to go and
work wet into wet with highly saturated
pigments. I have water colors that come from a
tube. I squeezed out a little bit and
diluted them just a little bit with
water. And then I'm going to take a big
brush and pretty much soak the page and
put a lot of water down. Play with the
colors and I think that'll be a very
nice antidote to the incredibly picky
and precise line work that I've been
doing for a month. So just have a great
deal of fun with the color and enjoy it.
So I learned something interesting about
nebulas the which probably a lot of
people know but this was something I
just hadn't thought about before. And
that is that there are basically two
different kinds--there are nebulas that
are formed when a star goes supernova.
And those are relatively speaking
smaller.  And the Crab Nebula is a good
example of that. And they have kind of a
structure to them if you look at,
especially if you google the Crab Nebula
in particular. It's got a lot of kind of
strings of bright glowing gas so kind of
like lines throughout it and that's not
what I wanted to do here. The other kind
of nebula is much much bigger and those
are kind of star cradles where stars are
formed and they are much more fuzzy
diffuse and not not very structured. They
don't have the same kind of structure
and that's more what I wanted to do. And
I thought what I would do was I would
use the use a technique that actually is
frowned upon in watercolor, and that's
sometimes called cauliflower, the
cauliflower effect or something like
that. Where the colors bleed into each
other and form these
kind of diffuse mixing, kind of looking
like cauliflower bunches which, when
you're trying to lay a nice smooth sky
or gradient or anything, you really
really want to avoid. It's kind of the
opposite of what you want,but for this I
thought it would be really cool. And so
that I'm my main goal here is to just
put a lot of pigment down and then let
the paint's bleed into each other in
this cauliflower--and you can see it
happening here especially on the fast
thing--and let them do what they want and
just create these wonderful beautiful
interlacing of the colors. Let it
happen
and have fun and don't stress too much
about what its gonna look like,
just enjoy the intensity of color and
shape and interplay of them. So kind of
get back in touch with your inner
three-year-old. And then once that is
done and let dry, I go through and take
off all that masking fluid which reveals
the stars underneath. So go through the
whole page and just with a finger you
can kind of feel where the bumps are and
rubbing on them lightly will take off
the masking fluid. This leaves the stars
showing through nice and bright, and I've
managed to get a variety of different
sizes which is nice which gives you a
little bit different brightnesses. And
then after that I decided to also go
back in and using a white, I mean it is
watercolor but it's a titanium white,
and just using it undiluted . I
went in and did a bunch more stars and
this gives a slightly different
intensity of color and so I think it
does a good job of varying the star
scape behind it. And then I just went in
around the whole picture and put in
stars in titanium white. Zooming through
here and doing all of them. So that you
can kind of get a feel for the vastness
of space behind the nebula. So again this
isn't super complicated or super precise
technique it's just having fun with
color and playing around. I really liked
it so I did a couple of these just for
fun. I spent the afternoon playing around
doing a bunch of different ones. I like
this one a lot I like the colors and
the way this mixed. And a couple where the
background there is a little too light
but other than that I like it. This one
was just too pale. I just needed to
saturate the colors a lot more on this
one. And then I like this one too,  I again would
like the background a little darker but
the smaller nebula with more space
behind its kind of cool. So as always
thank you so much for watching. Take care
of yourselves, take care of each other,
and thanks.
