Painting Outer Space

Every year, at least one of my painting students will say "Ms. Jowers, how do I paint outer space?" and then every other student has to try it at least once that year because they see how much fun it is.  Its a very easy technique with a satisfying result.  I only let my students have blue, red, yellow and white paint.  They learn to make all the other colors in the world including black.  I will get a quarter size dollop of each color including the white.  I use a quarter inch flat brush (it can be bigger depending on the size of the painting.) and take red and blue to create a dark purple.  I will scrub this color onto the page in small round circular motions.  I will never wash out my brush and I will continue by adding some yellow, scrubbing, add some red, scrub , add some blue, scrub, add some white....so on until the entire surface of my painting is covered with beautiful nebulae gasses.  the white and yellow make lighter areas where stars are close by.  you want each color to show up so don't over scrub and blend everything too much.  I will then splatter light blue (blue and white) dots, light red (red and white) dots, light yellow (yellow and white) and then white dots all over the painting.  I explain that stars are different temperatures which is the cause for the different color dots.  pull back and look at your "space".  Pick about five different spots to create very specific stars.  I take a thin round brush and make white lines going out from one of the spots.  I will then put a yellow dot in the center and then a white dot on top of that.  those stars will tell everyone else that they are looking at outer space.

For this page,  I also wanted to create the eye of God.  I sandwiched a piece of cardboard between my pages with a cut out of a key hole.  before I glued the last page, I drew an eye so that it would look like it was looking into my page.  You can not see the key hole from the back of the page because the last page covers it.