We've got some fun events coming up at my school. A spring concert, and a prom, with the theme: Enchantment under the stars. A starry & cloudy night sky killed two birds with one stone, just like last year when the prom theme was Enchanted Forrest, and the spring program was Into the Woods. I love working smarter, so I can work harder on other projects. We started with a blue background, starting with the darkest blue at the top, and adding lighter blue to the paint pan, until it was a sky blue at the bottom. A couple of my students got a kick out of giving our stars of the silver screen (from our Hooray for Hollywood prom) some wacky features during the process.
As soon as that dried, I had two more students add the stars. The more the better. They wanted to space them all evenly, so I had to remind them to think in clusters and make some bigger than the others. Most of the stars were 6-8 feet off the ground so we tilted the sets down on a chair to make it more accessible.
When it comes to making clouds, it's easy to over-do it. Start with darker values. Just subtly shift the value from the background. And I used a brush that was about 4 inches wide to start. Then I started adding lighter colors until there was some areas of white, usually around the edges and tops of clouds using a one inch brush. It would make more sense to have a moon reflecting light back onto the clouds, but I'm saving a big moon for another photo op. I like to use an almost dry brush and scrub it on in circular motions so that it doesn't come off as a flat, coloring-book-style cloud. It didn't take long, and it is gratifying to knock out what is essentially a 32 foot mural in a day.
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