50+ Watercolor Night Sky Painting Inspiration Ideas Tips & Tutorials [Art Scene Examples]

Below are 50+ watercolor night sky painting ideas. These ideas are intended to provide you inspiration for your own watercolor night sky painting. After the photos, I have included a list of watercolor night sky painting tips for beginners and five watercolor night sky tutorial videos for you to learn from.

Watercolor Night Sky Art Inspiration Ideas

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Watercolor Night Sky Painting Tips for Beginners

• Moon Texture – When adding a full moon to your watercolor night sky scene, you don’t need to stress about details. Use a light grey and dab gently to create a textured look. You can look at a photo of the moon for guidance, but simple dabs and strokes are enough for a beginner’s painting (it doesn’t need to match perfectly).

• Gradual Darkening – As you move away from the moon, gradually use darker shades of blue, eventually reaching deep indigo at the edges of your paper. This creates a gradient effect for your night sky. Let each layer dry before adding the next to avoid smudging.

• Light Sky Washes – Begin your night sky painting with light washes. Use a pale blue color like phthalo blue and paint gently around the area where you’ll have the moon (or the brightest part of the sky). This creates a soft, glowing background.

• Stars – To create stars in you watercolor night sky scene, dip an old toothbrush in white gouache (a type of opaque watercolor) and flick it gently over your painting. This splatters tiny white dots, looking like stars. For bigger stars, use a small brush to add larger dots.

• Tree Silhouettes – To add trees, use a dark color like black or dark brown. Don’t worry about details – just paint simple lines and shapes for branches and leaves. The silhouette against your night sky will look great even with basic shapes.

• Moon Position – Think about where you want your moon. It can be anywhere, but placing it slightly off-center often looks nice. You can trace around a coin or a bottle cap to get a perfect circle.

• Too Much Detail – In the pursuit of realism, some beginners over-focus on detailing distant elements like stars or distant landscape features. In watercolor night sky scenes, subtlety is often best. Over-detailing can make the scene look unrealistic and take away from the soft quality of the night sky.

• Too Many Elements – I always like to remind beginners not to overcomplicate the sky. Some might try to include too many elements, like stars, the moon, planets, shooting stars, and clouds, all in one scene. This can make the painting look cluttered and detract from the overall effect. It’s often more effective to focus on a few elements and execute them well.

Watercolor Night Sky Tutorials for Beginners

Below are five watercolor night sky painting tutorials so you can follow along and learn:

Watercolor Night Sky Tutorial 1 – This tutorial demonstrates how to paint different phases of the moon using watercolor techniques. The focus is on creating seamless blends and patterns to emulate the moon’s surface. Click here to view.

Watercolor Night Sky Tutorial 2 – This tutorial covers the process of painting a night sky with indigo, highlighting the use of minimal layers for effectiveness. Techniques for creating a gradient sky and adding stars with gouache are discussed. Click here to view.

Watercolor Night Sky Tutorial 3 – This watercolor night sky scene video tutorial guides viewers through painting a detailed watercolor moon using a wet brush on dry paper, with emphasis on creating texture and depth. The process includes layering and adding highlights to enhance realism. This is a good place to start if you want to create realistic moon paintings. Click here to view.

Watercolor Night Sky Tutorial 4 – This tutorial presents four different night sky watercolor paintings, each exploring various techniques like wet-on-wet, creating moonlight effects, and using salt for texture. It focuses on experimenting with different scenes and learning watercolor beginner techniques. Click here to view.

Watercolor Night Sky Tutorial 5 – This tutorial creates a watercolor night sky painting using layers and the wet-on-wet technique, starting with a light wash of phthalo blue and gradually adding depth with Payne’s gray. The sky is then splattered with white gouache stars and a shooting star, and completed with a dark silhouette of trees using a scumbling technique for texture. Click here to view.