Paint a Gorgeous Watercolor Night Sky: Easy Beginners Tutorial

Adjust your easel so that your paper is at a 30 degree angle, this will ensure that your paint mostly flows downwards. Separate your watercolor paints into different palette wells. Keeping them separate like this ensures that they stay vibrant looking and avoids having them mix and turning muddy. Muddiness tends to occur when complementary colors mix. For more information on this and color mixing in general, have a look at this post.

For this example I’ve used Cadmium Red, Pthalo Blue, New Gamboge, and Dioxazine Purple but any combination of bright colors will work. Paint loose wet Patches using your bamboo brush, don’t worry too much about creating a perfect blend, as we will use a spray bottle to encourage the colors to mix in the next step.

After you have painted some loose wet areas of color using your bamboo brush, allow them to run and blend. There’s no need to worry about creating a perfect blend, simply spritz with a fine mist from a spray bottle to encourage the colors to mix even more. This will create a beautiful, blended effect. Allow the paint to dry completely before moving on to the next step

Create a strong opaque dark blue from Paynes Gray and Prussian Blue. Using your bamboo brush, paint silhouettes of tree shapes underneath the night sky. I’ve left some small unpainted highlights among the trees and on the ground to indicate reflected moonlight and background sky showing through.

Squeeze out some white gouache or Titanium White watercolor, I prefer to use gouache for this as it is more opaque than watercolor. Take an old toothbrush and flick the bristles spattering the sky with small flecks of paint. This will create the effect of stars in the night sky.

If you want to add more details to the sky, use a small round brush to add larger stars and small lines radiating out to suggest a twinkling effect. This step is optional but can add a nice touch to your painting.