Let’s take the technique we learned in last week’s tutorial, Quick and Easy – Watercolour Galaxy, a step further. Lightning!

For this tutorial, I used:

• Farber Castell Watercolour Pencil in White (but any white pencil will do)
• White chalk pastel
• Sakura Gelly Roll in 08 (White)
• A small watercolour brush
• 140lb/300gsm cold-pressed, cellulose-based watercolour paper, which I secured with regular painter’s tape
• Hairspray (or art sealant)

I prepared the cloudy background using last week’s tutorial and a monochrome palette of greys and black, but the colour palette still doesn’t matter—feel free to use whatever shades speak to you.

Step 1

Prepare your painting surface. I have a tutorial on How to Stretch Watercolour Paper here.

Step 2

Paint the clouds and allow them to dry.

Step 3

Using the white chalk pastel, draw jagged, forking lines across the page. They don’t have to be perfect, but these are easy to erase if you want to correct them. Rub them right off with a dry paintbrush or facial tissue.

Step 4

Blend out the edges of the chalk pastel with a dry paintbrush and circular motions.

The pastel will create a halo for the lightning. Don’t feel disheartened if this step fades so much it’s difficult to see—we’re going to rinse and repeat until it’s dark enough to stick!

Step 5

Repeat the previous step until you’ve reached a good opacity.

I blasted a thin layer of hairspray between layers to lock down what I’d already applied, but it still took five layers to reach the right opacity.

Step 6

Brighten the middle of the glowy forks with a white pencil. This step creates a brighter area directly adjacent to the fine lightning we’ll add in the next step.

Step 7

Finally, draw in the lightning with a white gel (or other) pen. I like to keep the lines jagged, sometimes adding more than one line to a segment to add a sense of movement.

And that’s it!

Unfortunately, I’ve misplaced some of my art pics, and I’ve gifted the original artworks to people all over. Besides this (super old) photo showing this technique with yellowish lightning on purple clouds, I’ve painted blue and green clouds with white lightning, and I’ve also done green lightning on blue and black (which looks super cool, simply substitute the white chalk and pencil for light green, but keep the white gel pen).

Until next time.

Yolandie