 Hello there, I'm Sandy Alnok and it is Galaxy Week in my world and today I'm going to paint a bit of a fantasy painting, part one. The reason it's Galaxy World in my life right now is because I just launched an intermediate galactic watercolor class. So you're going to see lots of galaxies on my socials all week long to let people know about the class. It's taught in near real time, I mean I'll speed up the drying using the heat gun and stuff but the painting itself will all be done in real time as opposed to today's video which is going to be sped up just because it's YouTube and I get a lot of painting to do in this particular work that I'm creating today. But the class is available now, links in the doobly-doo and I'll show you a little bit more about it later and talk about it a bit during this video as well. A few sky color options. I have been painting galaxies for a couple weeks now trying to figure out what is the best color for the background because I like these epic skies and creating a lot of drama and so these are four options, I'm linking them in the supply list but for the class you don't have to have them all but I thought you might like to see the differences between them in the results that you get and Indigo is kind of my go-to I think out of all of these I really do like it a lot. So masking, I'm using masking fluid here created my balloon in the foreground and I'm using a cheapy brush, I dipped it into some dishwashing liquid to protect the brush slightly and then started painting. The stuff is orange in this jar, this is the Grumbacher Misket and the cool thing about it being orange is you can see where you've painted it, which is nice because when it's white you can't quite tell unless you look at an angle and that sort of thing. So to paint a spiral galaxy this is different than what's in class as well because in class I teach you how to do irregular galaxies, they're like shaped in any which way that's where they're super forgiving. A spiral galaxy has more structure to it because of the way that it spins so it's not nearly as forgiving. I may do a part two to the galaxy class, I might have to do a second one because I'm practicing now how to do these spiral galaxies and elliptical galaxies and just lots of different shapes. I don't really know how to teach those yet so you're seeing one of my practice ones here. And what I have decided to do is paint all the base colors first, all of the brightest colors and your mind will think of those as being the colors on top but that's not actually the way that I'm painting it, I'm painting it in the reverse. So just putting down all of the colors so that I have that brightness and one of the challenges with doing it this way is making sure that your colors are bright enough before you put the darks in because the dark colors do two things. One is they'll make anything that's light pop. That's one of the reasons you want to have dark contrasting colors but it also can weaken the colors that are there because even though they look bright right now, they will soften. They're going to soften by the fact that water colors lightens as it dries but also by contrast because the more darks you have, it's just going to temper everything because color is seen in relation to everything that is around it. So here I'm going to start putting in some really dark colors and this is the Indigo. It's got a bit of a bluishness to it but it also has a nice darkness as well and then I'm adding a little bit of black in the far corners because that gets like really, really dark and really, really rich. Down in the bottom section here by the balloon itself, I decided I wanted to have a little cloud of light color because my idea for this and I didn't know if it was going to work out or not was to make it look like this balloon is traveling toward the galaxy. It's in motion so I wanted to have a little magical doodly-doo back behind it or something. I'm not sure like magic dust. Not sure that when you take a balloon out into outer space if you actually have magic dust there but nonetheless, I'm using some thicker pigment going into all that wet paint. I've not dried any of this yet. It's just continuing to be moving and using some really, really thick Indigo to start putting some definition into the rings and just to create some dark areas so that I have something to work with and starting to add that contrast. You can see how it's giving those amorphous shapes of the underpainting a little bit more life. Now I'm going to add more layers of color because I want this outside to just darken and deepen before I put the stars in but I also want soft edges so I'm going to spray to get some of those edges moving and keep them from getting to be too hard and harsh in the painting. It's a challenge to figure out how much water. I wish I had a recipe which I could say two spritzes or whatever is going to be enough but it really depends on your paint and how wet the paper is already, how much water you end up needing and sometimes you'll end up needing two or three coats of the darks. If you mix your dark colors too thin, then they're not going to go in as more than a gray. If you want them to be really black you just need to keep going. So next up is watercoloring the hot air balloon and the first thing of course is to take the masking fluid off and you can do it with your finger or you can use a rubber cement pickup. The one that I have is from 20 years ago back in college, yes I still have some of my college art supplies, I don't throw things away as long as they work and that thing still works. Although I've had to chop off the corners of it because the corners just got too messy and they don't work anymore so mine is shaped a little weird now. I may have to invest in a new $2.48 rubber cement pickup at some point. So next up is the balloon itself and I'm making the light aimed at that far distant galaxy so the galaxy is casting the light onto it and I put really dark colors including that indigo as the shadow color and then just lift it off a tiny bit around the outside edge on the bottom. So there's white where the galaxy is shining but there's a little bounce light around the outside edge because when you're talking about something in outer space the whole front of the entire round object has light on it and there's just a tiny bit that almost curls around the edges so I'm going to get that put in there and then of course the basket with my characters in it and the characters, the identity of them will be revealed in the next video because this is a two-parter, I have another painting to do where you'll see who those two are that are in my little basket so I'll leave some mystery out there for the time being. Now I spritzed the stars on there using a toothbrush and some watercolor grounds and I knew that my hand was going to be in the way of all of this so I kind of did some fake footage of what I was doing with that brush trying to make the spiral arms of the galaxy. This is just an experiment to see if this would work. I think it kind of worked. I've got some ideas on different ways to try it but I'm tapping a flat brush and it's just a cheap brush using that Daniel Smith watercolor grounds titanium white and putting it along the spirals and I got something a little wonky in my spirals because I think they're supposed to spin the same way and mine kind of spin two different directions but you know we'll get over that and then used a tiny tiny brush to add some details because I needed to have the those bags they carry on I have to look up what they're called the bags they carry on a hot air balloon that weigh it down I don't know there's probably a name for those but I hung a few of those on the outside of the basket and added some highlights and shadows to the two figures that are inside and then used a very soft brush that was completely dry with some paint on it to just tap on that little cloud of pixie dust sort of that's behind them and then use the same watercolor grounds as I'm doing for all this white stuff to paint on some details onto the balloon itself I was debating how much I really needed but it needed to be attached I knew that so I painted the white on it got too white it was too bright so I painted over it with some of the blue paint and then added in the white lines down from the top of the balloon each one of those strings going around the balloon leads down into the basket there's a few more from the front side they became too bright so I went over them a little bit of the blue and it's done so there is my silly little fantasy painting and as I said in the next video which is going to be on Thursday this week instead of Friday you will see who it is that's in that basket because it's two figures that we're going to see later so the galactic watercolor class these are the finished paintings that are in that they're all fairly small they're like five by seven and you can do them whatever size you wish of course but five by seven seemed a good size to make these they're a lot of fun I've been having just a blast for a couple of weeks practicing these and learning some techniques and inventing some techniques because there's not much out there to learn from so there you go thank you for joining me hit that like button if you could it helps the channel out share this with a friend and I will see you again on Thursday