How to Paint the Northern Lights with Acrylics

Start with a stretched canvas and a wide flat brush. Load it with phthalo blue and a touch of black, then block in the top of the sky dark. Work your way down, adding more white as you go so the blue lightens toward the horizon.

Blend while the paint is still wet. Long vertical strokes, then soft horizontal ones to knock out any streaks. You want a smooth graded sky with no hard lines. This dark base is what makes the aurora glow later.

Switch to a smaller flat brush and pick up turquoise blue and bright aqua green. Touch the brush to the sky and flick it upward in a soft, curving sweep. Let the stroke fade out at the top so it looks like light, not a solid stripe.

Keep your hand loose here. The aurora is never a straight line - it drifts and bends. Lay down one ribbon first and see how it sits against the dark blue before you add more.

Add a few more ribbons rising diagonally across the sky. Vary the height and the curve of each one so they overlap like a shifting curtain. Some should be tall and thin, others short and low near the horizon.

Step back every so often and look at the whole canvas. The bands should feel like they belong to the same wave of light, all leaning the same general direction. Fill the empty blue without crowding it.

Mix a little lemon yellow into your aqua green to get a brighter, warmer tone. Brush this along the core of each aurora band, right down the center where the light would be most intense.

Keep the yellow-green tight to the middle of each ribbon. That contrast between the bright core and the softer edges is what gives the aurora that lit-from-within glow. A fan brush helps feather the edges if you have one.

Load a thin detail brush or an old toothbrush with titanium white thinned slightly with water. Hold it over the darker parts of the sky and tap the bristles or run your thumb across them to flick a fine spray of stars.

Scatter the small stars unevenly, heavier in the dark corners and lighter over the bright aurora. Then use the tip of a round brush to dot in a handful of larger stars, adding tiny cross strokes on a few for sparkle.

Run a strip of masking tape across the canvas to mark a clean horizon line. Mix black with a little blue and, with a flat brush, paint dark mountain shapes along the top edge of the tape. Vary the peaks so the ridge looks natural.

Keep the mountains as flat silhouettes for now. They read as land against the glowing sky. A few lighter blue-green touches near the top edge suggest snow catching the aurora light.

Below the horizon, mirror the sky. Brush faint vertical streaks of the same greens and blues straight down into the water, then soften them with light horizontal strokes so they look like a rippled reflection. Flick a few more white stars into the water too.

Step back and check the balance. Add a last touch of white to the brightest aurora cores and the water sparkle. When the reflection echoes the sky, your northern lights scene is done. If you enjoyed this, try our galaxy nebula painting next.