How To Paint a Realistic Galaxy with Acrylics

Hello everyone! Today I will be showing you how I created this acrylic landscape of this beautiful Milky Way Galaxy photo that I found and a little bit behind the process of blending acrylics and a little bit of the methods on how I do my stars. Really good realistic paintings start with a reference photo and although this is not I usually use Unsplash for my reference photos because they're all free images you can take and you can use without penalties so I definitely recommend it if you're looking for some realistic reference photos but maybe don't have access to, for example, a telescope to get an image of the Milky Way. Even though some DSLRs these days make it possible, it can be a little challenging. So I did find this really beautiful image on Unsplash and I wanted to crop it and adjust it a little bit so I could kind of make my painting a little bit more of my own. And in my sketch you'll see that I'll also draw some trees at the bottom because I originally envisioned this painting to be sort of like in a forest. My sketch here didn't exactly do too much to help me during my painting process but it gives me confidence when I'm originally laying out where I'm painting things and I do use it as a guide in the beginning but once that I paint over my lines I kind of just lose the sketch entirely and just go with what I see on my reference photo. I do my sketch lines really really light as you'll see here it might even be hard to see but at the bottom you might be able to see that I'm starting to kind of draw out my trees that are not in the reference photo but that I wanted to put. And I drew some tall trees in the sketch but you'll see later down the road that I ended up going with short trees just to show the scale of the Milky Way. Now we are going to add a little bit of water to the back of our canvas with a brush. This is just a paintbrush with some clean water on it and what this does is it tightens up the canvas a little bit so it's not like droopy or there's not sort of like a kind of slope in the middle of the canvas it's just uniform throughout. Now I'm going to go ahead and bring out my palette out of its little stay wet plastic bag and the colors we are going to be using today are white, gray, blue, black, and some natural sponges and a soft sponge. And lastly we're going to use some red. So I'm going to start by squeezing out some black and blue on my palette and starting in the corners I'm going to work my way towards the middle of this galaxy with the darker colors coming first and then over time I will slowly blend to the middle which has this really nice blue hue. Right now I just have a little bit of water in my brush but I'm mainly trying to get the bulk of the colors down so I have a lot of pigment on my paintbrush and I'm just using a pretty large rounded paintbrush. Then I'm heading over to the other side and also working my way to the middle. I'm kind of seeing this as almost like a blur because I'm trying to get these colors really smooth together and a tip I have for blending acrylic painting is to do a lot of your color mixing on your palette and don't do a lot of it on the canvas. You don't want to like put some dark blue on the canvas, put some black on the canvas, and then mix them on the canvas. You can do that but I've found that it works a lot better for me if I blend them a little bit on the side, kind of create a gradient that way by bringing each color from my palette to the canvas and then gently blending them together instead of having to like worry about the muddiness that comes when you blend on the canvas. Some parts of this painting are sped up a little bit or this video would be three hours long because that's how long it took me to create this piece. This is I think my third or fourth ever galaxy. I'm getting better each time I do them but my goal is still to just get them really like smooth I guess. Just like the plasma that is actually out in the galaxy is really soft, looks semi-translucent. It can be sometimes hard to capture when you're painting so that is my goal with each new galaxy painting. Here I'm using some white to help blend the bottom because there's kind of this atmosphere at the bottom of galaxy images usually just like earth atmosphere or kind of like the sunset near the horizon, there's just a thicker amount of stuff to go through when you're taking a picture of the sky at the bottom so usually those areas are lighter and that's why I'm using white at the bottom here. But white can also be a really good blender when used in moderation for things that need highlights so I love it for that. If you're following along with me, don't worry, these are just the ugly stages and it will get better, I promise. But here I'm just trying to blend these light purples with the blues and the blacks together to make them look a little bit more cohesive because in this reference photo there are a lot of different colors, it's not just, oh the top of the sky is black and then it goes to blue and then it's actually the galaxy that is kind of having an influence on these colors and where they are in the piece. So focusing on that early on can help you and kind of thinking ahead in your painting process will help you a lot in the long run. So now I am getting this really pretty vibrant blue that I mixed with the original blue that we saw earlier and some white to kind of bring in this galaxy a little bit more because in the reference photo it looks so blue and like a nice blur out from the center of the galaxy from like the highlights to this blue to the dark blue, at least on the left, upper left side, so that's what I'm trying to do right here. I would say about 90% of this painting is just me blending so I'll try to give you a few blending tips that I've learned with acrylic paints over my four years of being self-taught. Probably the most well known is just using a little bit of water between your colors when you're blending if you're trying to make them look nice, smooth, flow into each other. You don't want to overdo it with the water because then you'll just get a soup that kind of runs everywhere, but currently all my paint is still wet is what I'm blending with right now, but once this dries up, after my painting has gone through the wet stage, everything's dried up where it's nice and easy to blend usually, I revert to dry blending and I just get a tiny bit of paint on my paintbrush and I'll usually dab a little bit on this cloth that you see I have laid down to just get a little bit on my brush and then I'll go in little tiny circles just blending from both edges, so black to blue and blue to black and so that's super helpful when your paint is all dried up. Another blending method if you don't really feel like using a paintbrush is also using a sponge, which I'll show a little bit later for my stars, but getting a little bit on your sponge and just going up and down, it's kind of like the nail art if you've ever seen that where they make the ombre nails that are really cool, basically using a sponge and putting different paints in different places and then just going back and forth with the sponge to blend them. So now I'm going in to create our first dark patches in our galaxy. It's kind of weird painting a galaxy sometimes because there's usually a dark line and then highlights that touch the line and then expand outwards from it and that's how I used to do my galaxies and if you're a beginner that's still a really awesome way. If you just wanted to create an all black or all blue sky and then draw two white semi-parallel but like jagged lines and then just blend them outwards, it'll create a basic galaxy. So that's kind of what I'm doing here, I left this white patch but I'm filling in in between the kind of white areas to make two to show that there's this substance in the middle. But taking it a step above just the two parallel lines, you can go off in different directions and create other little lines, kind of like a tree I guess, a little bit. So that's a little bit of what I'm doing here. I'm making sure that my dark areas extend, this is making my galaxy a little bit more jagged and realistic and following the reference photo. Here I used some of that red that I had a scrub earlier and a little bit of blue and white to start adding some warmer colors into the galaxy where it's closer to this sort of highlight area. And here's where my 90% of this tutorial is about blending, you'll see that I basically repeat this process where I put in some darker areas and I add a mix of lighter colors around the areas, mixing them on the side of my palette and then bringing them on and then creating a gradient that way. And I do this for all of the little lines I create on this white path. I wish I could make more step-by-step tutorials with very defined steps because I'm a person that likes clear direction and concrete things to be able to follow but a lot of my paintings just end up being, figuring it out each time, looking at the photo, replicating what I see with all these different sort of techniques that I've developed so I hope this format is still okay if you are pursuing this painting. But you'll see here that our dark areas that were jagged before are now starting to look a little bit softer, a little bit more blurry, which is exactly what I'm going for. I'm hoping to do some more of my own astrophotography. I've been a photographer for a while but I've never actually done night sky photography but I think there's a lot of really, really cool potential in it and looking at these images and reference photos, it's just like, wow, they're so beautiful but a lot of the technology that you need and equipment for taking detailed photos of galaxies and plasmas, it's crazy expensive but one day I think it would be cool to try and rent some stuff or take a few of my own but my DSLR does pretty decent at capturing the sky with a low, you know, long shutter speed. So I hopefully one day will be able to use my own pictures as references. Now I'm going up with some chunky blue dark areas, making them irregular and natural organic shapes will help me out in the long run with trying to get it to look a little bit more realistic because if I just did a straight line it might not be super real but I'm creating a little bit of space between my shapes too to make the blending easier and to allow those white highlights that are from the canvas to show through because the galaxy is the brightest in the middle where this photo was taken. Now I am going up here with the lightest white and creating another little glowy spot. I think I'm going to start calling them that because there's a few in this painting where there's a very distinct area where it's brighter than the others and that's a little bit in the top, mainly in the middle, and then a little bit to the left of the middle and you'll see that start to develop as I go on but I'm trying to leave as much white as I can on the canvas in those areas to help me blend later. I think this part of the painting is usually the most challenging because there's not one right way of doing it and I'm pretty still new to doing galaxies and they're very complex sort of things like you have to get these realistic but unrealistic shapes, it's not something that you see everyday so it's not something that you can easily practice more on so if it feels a little bit daunting or complex just do your best to copy maybe a reference photo you find and then your skills will develop over time and you'll have an eye for what to do in these situations to make it look like there's plasma and glowing and nebula stuff in the sky. For me my ultimate goal is to not use reference photos eventually and just have these kind of skills developed over years where I don't need to look at a photo I can be like oh yeah galaxy, dark edges, light middle, let's do some blending and then I can create paintings that are a little bit more original of having a reference photo even though they are really helpful. That's what happens in my digital art that I've just done so many that I just think of an idea in my head I'm like oh let's create a little mountain sketch here even if I just create a sketch from my imagination I'm able to use all my color skills from painting and other digital artworks that help me create the scene I want without actually needing a reference for lighting or sunset. I rarely use references in digital art but use them all the time in traditional art because I spend more time on traditional art and my goal is photorealism but I think it would be really fun to start eventually developing my own original paintings Bob Ross style. So at this point my paint has pretty much dried up if I'm not adding it to new areas and I have gone to that dry brushing that we talked about earlier where I just have a little bit on my brush and I'm going in these areas and blending it just with tiny amounts and then I'll just put more taps I guess in the area that I want darker and less on the area that is fading out to the lighter sections. If you've made it this far I am very proud of you for sticking with it. We are starting to add some really nice pinks and reds to our galaxy. In the reference photo they really show up well because it's so vibrant. Later on they kind of get blended with the blues that I add later but I honestly like the way it looks now. So I'm adding these pinks and then I'll go over dry brush them with some blue to help blend them into the rest of the atmosphere. This painting is really kind of more special to me because I'm taking this class right now that's like the science of climate change because I'm focusing on sustainability for my major and it's really pretty interesting how the plasma works and like the stars and the sun so I think it's really cool to be able to kind of paint that. You know just study at the same time you're painting. Think about like those concepts that you learn. It's really fun. I'm going back in with that darker rim and creating more of those outward branching branches I guess and then I'll go around the branches with a little bit of highlights to bring more focus into it. So I now have a little bit lighter blue on my brush and I'm going just up against those dark areas and making them stand out a little bit more and this is also what I do for all of the little branches that extend as I make sure the highlights, there's a big contrast between the darkness and then right next to it is the lightness that's what makes the galaxy stand out in the sky. So now the rest of this galaxy is just about repeating the same concept we talked about earlier but eventually I will start to a little bit mute the colors because right now they're so vibrant but I'll eventually get a dry brush again because all our paint has dried up and bring those darker colors from the edges of this piece into the middle to kind of mute a little bit more. Make it a little bit blend nicer because you can see that there's some areas that are a little rough where it just goes straight to blue to black like in the kind of upper left area. It's a little bit sharper and I'll eventually blend these areas out with dry brushing. But yeah, I filmed this video in my little college apartment and I am happy to be starting to voice them because I did get a nice voice setup. I got a microphone on Amazon because I did not know what I was doing and my computer mic was just absolute garbo. So I'm glad to upgrade slowly hoping to get more tutorials out and please let me know if you've made it this far, if you enjoy this type or if you prefer just music in the background or you prefer text over me doing a voiceover like this. The voiceovers do take a lot of time because it's just me sitting here recording it. Sadly my camera doesn't record like a good voice so I'd love to do it like in the moment and I'm sure I might have a little bit more to say instead of doing the voiceover like after. But yeah, let me know your thoughts. I'd love to hear from you and if you would like more focus on one thing over the other or if I'm being too repetitive, which I understand that I am sometimes, but I'm trying to break down a three hour process into one hour so hopefully it's working for you. Now I'm going to use a darker purple with a little bit more paint on my brush to blend these smaller outward branches a little bit more so they don't look so muddy in the scene. I'm still just using a dry brush with just a little bit on my paintbrush so I get the pigment across, but not that it's going to shock up my painting and not be manageable for me to blend in with the paint that is already on the canvas. So now I'm doing the dry brushing over these smaller branches and this really kind of puts some atmosphere between the harsh colors that we laid down and this light blue so it makes it look a little bit softer. This is a great thing to do if you're really struggling making it look blended, just going over it with a very light color to create almost like a fog or a mist. It also works great for creating clouds and low-lying fog if you're creating a forest. Now I'm just making this area as brightly highlighted as I can and I am at this point having a little bit of a hard time getting the white pigment to want to stay because I keep blending it out, but if you just keep building up these layers and making one area more prominent than the other then it'll eventually happen. Because I'm putting lighter colors on darker colors sometimes it's hard for it to want to, I guess, stay there and build up and you just need to put a couple layers on. This painting in a way is similar to my other raindrop painting where I was talking about how we can get things to look like they're out of focus or blurry and that's kind of what the galaxy does. In certain photos it looks really sharp and in other ones like the further it gets away from the center it gets just faded out. Now I am going to attempt to do some sponge blending because sponges are helpful sometimes even though dry brushing is still my go-to. I like to use sponges and just put a little bit of paint on them and then just dab that area over and over and move in tiny little directions away from the center of where I put my paint to kind of help it blend. Sponges also have pretty organic shapes so that can help if you feel like your painting is looking a little bit too fake or if you're going for more realistic. Sponges, they just have random shapes so it's great for that. That's also why I decided I wanted to try to use a sponge here. For the next ten minutes I will just be doing some touch-ups to the galaxy and I don't want to talk your ear off but all I've said and told you so far is exactly what I'll be continuing to do so if you don't want to just follow along, enjoy the music, then feel free to do that. So now I have turned down my camera settings a little bit to help kind of let the stars show up. You have finally made it to where we're adding the stars which is definitely the most fun part because it really brings the whole thing together. So for my stars I have kind of like two ways of doing them. I first lay down a white, just a pure white, little tiny speck with a pretty small brush and I'll lightly tap that speck either with my finger or with a sponge to kind of blend it out, make it look further away. And then I will go over that with a very light blue, just almost very very little pigment on it, just enough to make that white, like the blue stand out on the white and then now you have like a blue kind of faded gradient and then right in the center I will put a small white dot and what this does is it makes the star look like it's glowing. I will repeat this process with some red stars too but I wanted the biggest ones to be blue because that was kind of our galaxy theme but I also have some smaller red ones in there to kind of break up the types of stars there are. Now my second method for creating stars is using a toothbrush and this method is a lot faster but you do have to be careful. The key with splatter painting stars is making sure you have just a little bit of water in your paint. You don't want the paint too thick or else your stars will just be thick globs and then that will ruin your whole painting. And I would recommend just having like a 50% water, 50% paint ratio and playing around with that too if you like them a little bit more thicker or thinner. The thinner the paint is the easier they're going to splat but they'll also kind of dry up on your painting and they won't be as pigmented I guess. So they'll look really faded out. Maybe they'll look gray instead of like stars. So you have to find that balance between them. And then please, please, please practice splattering on like the side on something else. Like if you want to paint like maybe your palette really quick like black and then you can like do some test flicks before you actually go on your painting to do it or else it would be very sad. But this method is way faster than doing them by hand and I like doing it for the smaller stars. And then after I splatter paint them sometimes you saw that I used a sponge to kind of fade them out just like I make them a little bit more glowy and then I'll go back in with my sharp small white points to make them look like they're glowing more. So between using the toothbrush to splatter or you can also just use a regular paintbrush I find it's a little harder sometimes. And then going in by hand and touching up the ones that I think need some more highlights it creates this really nice flow that's kind of peaceful to just sit down and just do all of your stars this way. To some stars I'll also add the little streaks that go outwards like this big one kind of a little bit above the center to the left and just make little streaks that appear like they're twinkling. That's also fun to do to some of the bigger stars and it is kind of realistic in some of the pictures that like NASA has you'll see stars that have these like twinkles and they're always fun to add. So you'll see here that I wanted to do a little bit more splattering but I had a little bit too much on my paintbrush so what you can do if you've kind of messed up is you can try sponging it out to make it look a little bit more faded or you can just go over it with the color that was under. I don't recommend this but life happens so there's always a way to fix stuff. So now we are finally adding the trees and this is where I decided that I love my galaxy so much I didn't want to make trees that covered up all my hard work so I just decided to do a really thin row at the bottom. I basically create a stump with black and I'm using a really thin paintbrush and start at the top and kind of do v-shaped branches that slope up and then in the middle I do ones that go out a little more and then when you get to the bottom of the tree they kind of look like an upside down v. And that's how I do my pine trees. It's really quite simple. If you're looking for a more in depth tree tutorial I do have one on my channel that just shows you how to do trees in Procreate but the exact same thing can be done with acrylic paints. It's important if you want to create realistic trees to create them at various different heights and sizes to make it look a little bit more organic than if they were all just the same height throughout or across. Now after I finish the pine trees I'm going in and doing the edges of the painting just to finish it off. Some artists do it their different way. You can paint it whatever color you want but I like to kind of bring the same colors that were near the edge of that corner just onto the galaxy to make it just look more well rounded I guess. So here is the final painting in all of its glory and a couple shots to accompany it and show the details that can be sometimes a little bit hard to capture when you're zoomed out. I really hope you enjoyed this process. Here's a final look at the painting in some different lighting that brings out more of the blues. And if you enjoyed or if you liked it or if you didn't like it or maybe it didn't turn out the way you wanted to I hope that you enjoyed the process either way. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in my next video.