Sparkle Sky

There was a page of watercolor paper from last week I had laying around. Had almost thrown it away because honestly, the line work which was permanent was utterly awful. But, aside, it's perfectly good paper, it still has some use. So here I am making a gouache painting and this time I chose to do stars instead of flowers. I really like simple symbolic images like stars and flowers and lightning bolts etc.

Start off with a thin layer of blended rose red, violet, and cerulean gouache. I then draw the stars using a gel pen. I'll paint around them using a mix of purple black and cyan gouache. It's not going to be an even coat but that's okay, I like that. If I wanted an even coat I'd using a single acrylic paint)

done with the sky and I like where it's going but I want to add more.

To add some panache to the sky I'm going to use acrylic craft paint.  

It's bright on the blue and more transparent than gouache, plus I have 

the ability to paint hues of green and teal I wouldn't be able to get

using gouache no matter how much I mixed. normally I don't paint right out of the

bottle but since these details are going to be small I wont mix much at all.

Looking go so far

After tha acrylics I'm still not satisfied so
I'm using a sakura souffle pen which becomes transparent when dry.

oops.......I added too many lines with the sakura pen.
...I feel like the painting is overwhelmed.

So I go back and repaint the parts that I want removed.

And this is the completed painting. I like how it turned out for the most part. With practice I'll be able to discover more of what works in these types of paintings. This is the third time I've used the method of two layers of gouache to get this effect.