How To Draw a Starry Night Landscape Step By Step

✦ Introduction

Hello, I’m Cherrzart, a landscape and scenery artist.

In this tutorial, I will show you my process of drawing a Milky way Starry sky (My favorite Night Scene) step by step while explaining the different tools in Clip studio paint and how the night works (Things to keep in mind for your next night illustration).

✦ Step 1: The ground

To create a new canvas : Open Clip Studio Paint : File : New : Illustration and adjust the width, length and resolution.

First things first, start with the landscape (The dark elements) before working on the sky.

Since this isn’t a tutorial about how to draw Trees and Bushes, i’ll skip the details of this bit, but here’s what you should know :

1. The stars are not a strong light source for the objects on earth because they are very far away that the light simply doesn’t reach.

Therefore, the elements on the earth (landscape : Trees and bushes is this case) will remain dark for the most part, so I kept my ground dark but not black!

It is rarely ever black in an open space, so you should keep your colors Dark enough But Not Black.

An all around black landscape simply feels too unrealistic.

2. When you’re working on your landscape, keep the background color similar to what you imagine the sky will be (For Example : a dark blue).

Because a white background will give you the impression that your colors are too dark (because of the contrast).

As you can see in the following image, the same landscape with the same colors looks much darker against the white background than the blue one, so I might feel tempted to lighten it up but will later realize that I’ve ruined the values!

3. Don’t mind the details!

Here’s a zoomed in image of my landscape during the night a another one during the day.

Night scene: Although it looks like a believable landscape from afar, as you can see I didn’t put that much effort into my brush work or my colors.

The important thing is that the overall shape is correct but the rest is a bunch of dark colors that I smudged together.

On the contrary, in a daytime illustration I had to put more effort into my brush work and how I choose colors .

During the day, the light of the sun is very strong and it reaches almost every exposed object, so we have a wide range of colors and additional colors coming from reflected light from the sky, the ground and the objects around.

However, during the night, the light of the moon or the stars is very weak per comparison so it doesn’t reach the object in it’s entirety and thus the color of the object itself isn’t very strong and we don’t have reflected light which leads to a very limited range of colors, mostly consisting of cold blue tones.

This is one benefit of drawing a night scene, so many details get lost with the lack of light, making drawing much easier.

With that out of the way, Let’s see how to draw a milky way starry sky :

 

 

✦ Step 2: The Sky

I wanted my night to be very dark to make room for some contrast with the milky way later, so I chose two varieties of dark blue and shaped my sky forming a tilted pathway for what would later be the milky way.

So with that in mind, I used the default brush : Soft Airbrush, to lay down the colors of the sky.

You can find the Brush in the Tools bar : Pen : Airbrush : Soft

The default density is set to 50% which means that the harder you press on the pencil, the stronger the color will be.

And the lighter pressure you apply, the lighter the color will be.

So essentially, you can create different hue from the same color, depending on how you use it.

I chose this brush because it’s soft which allows a natural transition in colors and with this feature (density), I can control my colors better.

After I laid down the base color, I started creating the milky way.

Basically, you need to lay down your colors in a way that creates a slim and tilted triangle in the sky and we’ll build our layers as we go, based on that Idea.

 

 

First, I used the “Galaxy Stars” Brush.

You can find in in Clip studio paint Assets library :

Go over to Assets library : Type the name or title of the brush you’re looking for and you’ll get a bunch of different results.

Click on the brush thumbnail to open the brush page, then click Download.

Once it’s finished downloading, Go over to CSP MATERIALS and you’ll find it in Downloads File.

Drag the brush over to the Subtool bar and drop it.

And there you have a new brush installed.

I started by laying down an initial white layer of galaxy stars.

And I kept adding on top of it to create the shape of the milky way.

The colors should be concentrated on the edges of the path and get dimmer the further we go away.

Along with the Galaxy stars rush, I used Csp Default spray brush, particle size around 2-3 to add some texture.

Then I simply alternated between the two brushes to create the milky way.

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The milky way can appear in different colors, but I chose Blue because it suits my taste.

I didn’t start with a saturated blue from the get go but rather built it slowly to keep my values correct and the overall scene harmonious.

Once you start implementing colors, you’ll realize that this Galaxy stars brush only works in white.

as you can see in the following image, even though I chose the color red, the outcome remained white.

So what you’ll have to do with this brush, is create a new layer and then clip it (like it’s shown in the following image) to the layer beneath it (the galaxy layer), and then fill that layer in you chosen color.

This way, you can have colored galaxy stars.

After I laid down my colors, I added a more saturated color.

be careful not to make the whole path saturated, just a few touches here and there.

you can either choose the color manually, or if you want that “pop”.

create a new layer and set the layer mode to “ass(glow)”, this adds more vibrancy to your existing colors.

And this was my results.

 

 

I felt like it needed a small retouching so for this next step I used the liquify tool.

It is a default tool in clip studio paint that allows you to alter the shape of your drawing, fixing some mistakes, enlarging, slimming and so on.

So I made the path a bit smaller without the need to redo or add anything.

Honestly, this is one of my favorite tools because it allows me to correct mistakes without having to restart on any part of my illustration.

And this is what the “initial” milky way sky looks like.

✦ Step 3: The Stars

Now all we have to do is add stars (Using Csp spray brush):

First let’s add small stars, scattered all around the sky.

Particle size around 2-4.

 

 

Then, add “middle sized” stars across the sky (but not as much starts as the small ones)

And then add more stars on the milky way (edges of the path).

✦ Step 4: The Lake

Now let’s move to the lake :

First I used the “Water ripple” Brush to lay my base colors (same colors as the sky since the water reflects the sky).

 

 

Then in order to create the soft, clear surface of the water, I used : Filter : Blur : Motion Blur : set the angle to 0 to keep it horizontal and adjust the strength to get a water surface.

Then i repeated the same thing but this time to add dark reflection of the land on the sides, this adds a depth to my lake and enhances the sky reflection in the middle.

Again I did the same thing, but in blue, to add a faint reflection of the milky way.

Since i’m depicting a calm night, there isn’t much wind so naturally the ripples are very small and the lake appears reflective and clear, and that’s why i keep blurring the ripples I make.

Then i added a layer of very small dotes (particle size 0.5-1) and blurred it using Motion Blur too, to add some texture.

So basically because it’s night time, we only need a little reflection of the water, it’s nothing complicated, just add colors of what the water s reflecting and blur horizontally.

Then I added some white dots to reflect the stars (just some of them).

And blurred them a bit so that they blend with the scene.

Going back to the sky, to make the stars blend with the sky realistically and yet still pop out, I used : Filter : Blur : Gaussian Blur to Blur the stars.

Then I duplicated the “bigger stars” layer, and set the layer mode to “add(glow)”

 

 

This step gives a vibrant glow to the stars and makes the illustration more appealing.

 

Finally, using Csp default brush I added 3 stars to emphasize that the dots are stars and to add even more brilliance to the illustration.

I used the color blue for the big star and white for the other two just for variation.

I blurred them using gaussian blur as always to make them blend in the scene and then I duplicated the layer and set it to “add(glow)”.

Basically I did the same steps i used for the stars earlier and it gave me an extra pop in my sky.

I liked my final results but felt like the blue was too strong.

In order to change hue, saturation or brightness in Clip studio Paint, go over to Edit : Tonal Correction : Hue/Saturation/Luminosity and adjust according to your liking.I simply shifted the blue a little bit and toned it down.

✦ Final Illustration

And this was my final illustration.

I hope you like the process and benefited from it.

If you’d like to see my other illustrations, here’s my profile :