The Northern Lights forever captured imagination even as a little girl growing up in the western ghats jungles of South India.

As someone who grew up struggling with poverty in a middle-class Indian family, there was no hope of me ever seeing them unless I traveled to Scandinavia or Canada.

And since that looked completely unaffordable when I used to work as an engineer in 2017, I resolved to experience them by painting them.

What else could I do?

But every time I attempted to paint them from YT tutorials, they looked like this 😳👇

Here I was - yearning to feel the awe, peace and happiness of seeing the Aurora Borealis, but instead, I was frustrated with the patchy look and ready to fling my supplies across the room.

I've been painting and refining Northern Lights techniques in watercolors over the past 7 years. And the biggest factor I found that leads to patchy Auroras (apart from using chalky, student grade paints) is excessive blending with the brush.

If you want to paint effortless-looking, glowing northern lights, then have two pieces of advice for you:

1. Allow the colors to mix on the paper
2. Make the unpredictability that comes with this method feel safe to your brain

Allow the colors to mix on the paper

A lot of watercolor magic happens when you get out of the way and let the colors + pigment + gravity do their thing freely, without much of your intervention.

Instead of pre-mixing every shade of the Northern Lights on your palette and blending them all with your brush, drop your main colors and let them blend on the paper organically, mixing and swirling.

This might sound simple, but it requires a bit of courage.

When you wet your paper and begin dropping in the core Aurora colors, resist the urge to control where every drop of paint goes. Instead, tilt your paper, watch how the colors flow, and let them blend naturally.

Still sounds too scary? Here’s what I recommend - get a spare piece of 100% cotton paper, a piece of paper that’s not your final painting.

Wet the paper generously with clean water, and generously introduce your lighter Northern Lights colors like Lemon Yellow (PY3), Deodar Green (PG7) and Quin Gulaal (PV19).

Just drop the wet paint into the water and tilt your paper up, down and sideways, allowing the colors to swirl into each other with the help of gravity.

Do the same thing when you introduce your night sky colors, like Trupti’s Indigo and Trupti's Grey to increase the contrast. But this time, make your paint consistency a little thicker so that this darker color doesn't flow too much and obliterate those beautiful glowing colors of the dancing lights.

When you’ve built up the layers this way, you will get harmonious Northern Lights where their soft light is captured by the soft, organic blending that’s happened because you allowed the colors to mix on the paper by themselves, instead of scrubbing the paint in with your brushes.

This is the secret of ethereal looking dancing lights in your watercolor paintings.


HERE'S WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE STEP-BY-STEP:

This brings me to my second piece of advice…

Make the unpredictability that comes with this method feel safe to your brain

If you’re like most of my perfectionist-students, you struggle with getting smooth blends with the above method because it’s hard to let go of control.

Here’s why it’s hard - deep down you believe that controlling every little element in your process and obsessively blending with your brush will keep you safe from a bad outcome, like a patchy painting. Did I strike a chord there for ya?

I get it, because I used to be the same way and my earlier paintings reflected it.

Look back on your childhood and pinpoint where you learnt the need to control everything. In my case, it was growing up as an eldest daughter with all my family’s expectations tacked on my little shoulder.

Love and attention was withheld from me until I did something perfectly, and that's how my brain learnt to control outcomes in order to keep me safe.

Recognize that wanting to control outcomes in your paintings is something you brain does to keep you safe.

What your brain doesn't know is that there is no real threat to you if you the results don't match your expectations, or even if your painting goes sideways!

You can tell your brain that it is safe for you to enjoy the unpredictability of allowing the colors to mix how they want by breathing deep + elongating your exhale when you feel that perfectionist anxiety come up.

You must break the anxiety pattern in real time by using your breath. The best technique is to simply make your exhale longer than a deep inhale, or even breathing in a square pattern to the count of four (this is called Box Breathing).

So essentially, you're using your breath to break out of excessive blending and fiddling with your brush (which is exactly what leads to patchiness) and just letting watercolors do their thing on the paper.

Both of these tips combined should allow you to make luminous Northern Lights like this:

A huge part about making sophisticated-looking watercolor paintings is to actually reduce your intervention in the process of this medium that seems to have a spirit of its own.

But for many of us who grew up believing that we must work super hard and DO a lot of things to win approval and love from our caregivers, it's hard to take the easiest route to watercolor success and actually enjoy the process, no matter the outcome.

 
Practice these two tips and share the results with me in our BPA Creative Club Free FB community.

Need more hands-on help and lots of loving encouragement?

If you’d like in-depth tutorials where I hold your hand as you paint stunning mountain scenery like Northern Lights, Misty Pines and Lake Reflections, then check out my new Enchanting Watercolor Landscapes Bundle.

It’s a collection of 6 mini-classes perfect for beginner and intermediate artists to loosen up in their paintings and paint with a calm confidence by mastering landscape techniques.

Let me finally reveal the secret *micro-adjustments* in heart-centered watercolor principles that will finally make sense to your brain and your nervous system.

Ease is what creates those glowing, effortless-looking watercolor paintings. You will get that in my classes.

Following my creative calling and painting my beloved mountains with watercolors helped me heal from lifelong trauma, its resulting perfectionism and fulfill my biggest dream of living abroad! I now live in Calgary, Canada, and this place is exactly like all the mountain landscapes that I painted in India.

Whenever you're ready, join us.

Find out more here.