Easy and Quick Christmas Card Watercolor Tutorial - Starry Moonlit Night Sky with Gold

Hi everyone, today we're going to do a little more exploration of our new set of Kuretake paints here, this 48 pan set, and what I'm going to do is a sort of semi-abstract kind of interpretative sort of loose kind of view of the moon. We're now through the trees with some falling snow and stars in the sky and whatever you care to put in your painting, and today I'm going to be working on some Hahnemühle bamboo paper, which is a mixed media paper. It's made from 90% bamboo fibre and 10% cotton rag. It's vegan and I used it once before, not long ago, for this little playtime event and I liked it. I think it's really good and I'm thinking of getting a good supply of it. I happen to have a few sheets in my trousseau, that is to say in my plan chest, came from somebody that gave them to me I think. Anyway, so I'm getting towards the end of it. This is the label from Germany, Hahnemühle. I can get it here in France but you can also get it on Amazon. So we're going to be using a small piece here. I think this is probably about five, let me measure it, five or six inches tall. Sorry, put that around the right way, six and a half by ten that is, but I'm only going to use sort of like the centrepiece like that for this. So I'm going to do it in blues, the background is going to be in blues. So I've got here a number 11 round draw well brush, any nylon, synthetic, you know, good quality watercolour brush would do for this. You could use a flat if you want to, but it doesn't matter what you use really, any brush will do, any deal will do. Thank you Boris and goodbye. Okay, so on this set here we've got quite a few blues and if you look here we've got, I'm just looking for my doodah, when I say doodah I mean colour chart, which I did earlier. These ones here are opaque or at least semi-opaque like gouache, so that means they've got quite a lot of white in them. So if you want an opaque blue for the sky for example, that's quite nice. And then we go into colours which are a little bit more like ordinary watercolour, so we have a turquoise, dark turquoise here, cerulean, cobalt, ultramarine, prussian, indigo and blue grey. And you can see how important it is that you do have a colour chart that you've made, they give you this, so that's easy enough, in fact they give you two, one on the inside of the box and you just have to put a little dab of paint on there so that you know what you're looking at, because basically from where I'm standing these all look basically the same kind of dark colours, but they're not necessarily, this is cerulean and if you were to use that lightly that'd be perfectly fine for the Of course the whole point of watercolour is that you use a lot of water with whatever you have in your pan or your tube, so you can dilute it down as weakly or as little as you like. So I thought, well I don't know really, I think probably what I'll do is with this one, I just started to paint and I just kind of added to it all the other colours, so I began and I'm going to do the same here, I began with cerulean because I'm still, you know, this is still exploring the paints and seeing how they work, because they are a bit different from the traditional watercolour that I used to use and this method of painting from a pan like this is not my usual method, but I know that it's very popular with people out there who have been following other artists, I know it's quite a popular method to paint from the pan, so I'm not going to try to force everyone to do it the way I do it, we'll have a go at doing it like that. So I'm just basically picking up these different colours of blue along here and seeing what we've got, I sort of put a fairly light blue around the outside perhaps to start with and then the idea being to darken it up as you go towards the middle. Really one of the good things about this particular kind of paint, this Kuretake as opposed to any other, is that it seems to be very well behaved when it comes to blending and I don't know why it is exactly, maybe it's because the particles of the different colours of paint are similar in size, I don't know, but anyway you get fewer backruns and things with this paint. So I'm going to put a nice dark area in the middle like that and then I'm going to blot out the moon from back there and I think that's probably dark enough but what I did on the other one, having done that, I went and got some of the opaque blue, the pastel blue, and I just added that around the outside. I don't know why I did that but the result I thought was quite nice, it sort of, I don't know, you don't have to do that if you haven't got this set, don't worry about it, just paint a big square blue, rectangle of blue and let's make sure that this centrepiece is nice and dark. Okay that will do and then to blot out the centrepiece you could have drawn around a circle but what I'm going to do is sort of about a third of the way down and more or less in the middle, I'm just going to come in with a paper towel and lift out some colour like that and we'll call that the moon. Okay so you just need to make a kind of circle thing like that and then just press down and you'll get the paint will lift up. So that's that, now we have to let that dry because the next step is going to be to draw some tree trunks and branches so that has to dry, so I'll be back in a minute. Okay so that's dry and now we're going to start on the next step. I'm going to draw these tree trunks and branches in and I'm going to use watercolour pencil, this is a Staedtler Carat Aquarelle which is, this one is black, they come in other colours but the one I have here is black. I use quite a lot of these, so I have a box of six here, new ones, but I'm just using up the little stubs of the old ones that I had first because you know, waste not want not, and I've just today, I've stuck this rubbery thing on the end which came off of an old biro to give it a little bit more length so I can actually hold it properly in my hand. I was thinking about buying one of those pencil extenders but then somebody suggested that and I thought that's a good idea and then I couldn't find a pen to fit it but I did find this piece of rubber so that is going to work okay I think, so we'll see how that goes. And I'm also going to use, in this next process, I'm going to use some of this PH Martins bleed proof white which I've mixed up in a little dish here so that I can use it for spattering the snow and also I will be doing some spatter with the Kuretake Starry Colours, so you can see I'm on a pretty hefty Kuretake binge at the moment, so let's get started. Right, so I'm going to use this pencil kind of sideways to just give me a wider line and I'm going to grow some trees up through this blue background. Now the cool thing about using watercolour pencil for this obviously is that once you've put it in place you can then wet it and it will become ochre. This particular one is particularly good at becoming dark I have found, so we'll put some fairly noticeable ones in the foreground and I'm going to do them sort of leaning in a little bit towards the moon and then we're going to just drag a few spidery branches across the face of the moon like that, so a few biggish ones in the front and then as they go further back we get a little bit lighter and we'll have a fairly strong one here and I wanted to put a branch across the moon and I'm going to put a little, very very lightly, a little owl there. You could put all sorts of birds in there and you could do them bigger if you want, if you do your moon bigger you could do that and so the idea is of this is that the branches are all in the trees are kind of leaning in a little bit to give a little bit of a sense of movement in this forest making a kind of corridor or pathway through and as you do them you'll realise that that's what you're creating and then in the middle we'll just do them really quite lightly and try to space them a bit irregularly avoiding that tendency we all have to make everything line up in a regimented fashion and we want a couple in the distance here so it's definitely best to use the pencil on its side you do need a point but you don't use the point okay so maybe just fill that gap there a little bit and then we could go ahead at this point and wet some of this or you could leave it to the end but if you want to you can make them darken that up I should just go over those lines it's a technique I use quite a lot it's quite nice for trees because of course trees have generally speaking what you might call irregular bark patterns and by doing it like this quite lightly you can simulate that if you want you can leave the ones in the background unwetted so they fade away really well but just a few of them and you might want to make ones here darker too so this is a number three round it's a small brush makes it a little bit easier and you don't have to go over the pencil exactly you can sort of go outside the edges because it'll dry and when it's dry you won't notice you didn't so some of the darks in the background there as well you could put grass in too if you want you could put some small things down the bottom but the next thing we're going to do though is we shall do some spatter which is always fun so I need my trusty toothbrush if I can find it there it is and what I did on the other one was wake up my toothbrush and then I need to also similarly wake up the gold paint a little bit let's see if I can find a brush there's a cheap brush to do this so I put water on these earlier and I gave them a jolly good talking to so they should be pretty much ready to roll and see how it goes and we will want white as well you could put the white on first if you want or you can put the gold on first let's see how this goes probably if you don't like getting mucky this is probably not something you want to do because you will get mucky but so the idea is you might want to put a screen around it if you want to stop it from going over the edge but you have to do that I haven't done that there we are so we want a quite a bit of gold you might need to experiment with different toothbrushes because not all toothbrushes are the same so that's that and I think we might put a little bit of silver as well and then the white so we're going to spatter with the brush you can do the gold and silver with a brush as well if you want but you'll get bigger blobs and the one that I did before I managed to rub my hand over it it's always the way I'm pretty clumsy like that so some of them sort of turned into birds so that's something you could do on purpose if you wanted to but otherwise that's pretty much it we are done and I think you'll agree that's quite a what's the word a sort of mystical sort of appearance we have there so give it a try and oh you could go in after you've done the the spots and things and it's dry you could go in and darken down some of the trees if you want to I mean you can play with this idea and come up with your own version of it but yeah Christmas card eh another one two in two days and it's only August what am I doing okay I'll see you again tomorrow bye everybody bye