Learn All About Galaxy Painting
The galaxy – it’s fascinating! All of those marvellous planets with different shapes, sizes, and colors so far away from us yet visible from a telescope – with hidden secrets and lashings of mystery. We’re still learning so much from outer space and our own galaxy let alone all the other undiscovered galaxies beyond the realms of our own world. If you’ve ever wanted to capture the galaxy through galaxy painting or learn how to draw a galaxy, we’ll give you some great tips to get started. You can also visit YouTube to find out about galaxy painting, here’s a great tutorial! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8s_g_suAlQ
For Galaxy Painting Use Acrylic Paints
We’d recommend acrylic paints for galaxy painting, and you need a set of sponges to help create the blurring effect that you no doubt want to create. Use a synthetic or natural sponge for this process. You’ll also need brushes (a round or small brush and a ¾” large brush) and a toothbrush or splatter brush. For galaxy painting, easy colors such as magenta, violet, aqua green, turquoise, blue, white, and black will suffice. Limit your colors or your image will be too bright and remember, a galaxy is in the night sky so it shouldn’t be overly colorful, think splashes of color instead!
Choose Your Canvas
While you can use any size canvas, we’d suggest trying an 11 x 14 canvas and an 8 x 10 canvas for galaxy painting.
Paint Your Galaxy Sky
Start by using the large flat brush to paint your surface black. Soak your sponge in magenta and white paints – you’ll only need to use a very small amount of paint on the sponge. Don’t overload.
Add a Diagonal Stripe
Next, paint a diagonal stripe right across your canvas using the magenta and white colors (just a tiny amount of white required). Wipe away any excess paint on your sponge and blur the paint by sponging over the colors you’ve just painted on the canvas. A good tip is to twist the sponge.
Carry On Blurring the Canvas
Next, place violet and white colors on your sponge and carry on sponging the canvas using a blurring technique on different areas. Start with the lower right corner – again, just use a tiny bit of white on your sponge. Once this is complete, dim down your colors. This is going to give you a nice night sky effect.
Add Blue to Another Area of the Canvas
Repeat the same using blue and white colors but choose a different area of the canvas. Then, repeat the same again but using bright green. You can dim the colors with a tiny bit of black – remember, don’t use too much! Layer up your colors with more sponging once you’ve finished dulling down the first layer.
Add Stars
Next, take the toothbrush and use the white paint to splatter over white stars on top of the colors (you can buy a special splatter paint brush to achieve the same look). You can paint bright stars with the very small round brush too.
Next, Paint a Starburst
To do this, you’ll need a small round brush to paint a starburst and the white-colored paint. You should practice how to draw a galaxy starburst first, it’s a little like a computer asterisk! Drag strokes using your paintbrush from the center of your starburst outwards so it looks like it’s moving. Add lots of white in the middle to make it extra-bright. Keep on building up the white until it’s really bold. The more layers you add, the better your starburst will look! Another great tip is to add a tiny bit of purple to the edges of your starburst. Don’t be frightened to use other colors for stars – especially as you get better at painting a galaxy! You can use yellow and orange too and try adding clusters of stars. Remember to add lots of them to make it an authentic looking galaxy painting.
Add Your Planets
For your planets, you need to learn how to draw a galaxy using chalk. So, let your galaxy background dry first and then draw on the planets using chalk colors. Next, you add planets. Paint the first one just using white and wait for it to dry. If you want to add an eclipse, use a mix of white, pale green and black. With every planet, start with white and then apply the color you want. You can also shade them using black and white. Saturn should be white followed by yellow. Use the small brush to paint the rings with gray and black paint. To get planets looking like they’re in the distance, just paint small circles using the round brush.
You see, painting a galaxy is very easy when you know how, and you don’t need to be a professional artist to get the effect of a masterpiece! In fact, it’s so much fun because if you make a mistake, you can simply layer over it with sponged color to hide it – it just becomes a part of the night sky.
