How to paint a Universe T-shirt- With Planets and Galaxies

Every time I see new photos from NASA I feel so tiny , and so amazed by the beauty of the Universe.It's silent, mysterious and so abstract with all the merging colors on a deep black background. It is truly a great source of inspiration and a very cool theme to use on your products or clothing.

There is a trend circulating lately , with Galaxy DIYs, where it shows you how to obtain those abstract patterns and colors of galaxies, so I thought I would show you a more complex design with a piece of the Universe, that includes planets, stars and galaxies.

So to make this very useful for you , I thought of a T-shirt with Universe design, because clothing with designs like that can be very very expensive.

Let's get started! But before we begin here is something to pin :

You will need:
1.A black cotton T-shirt. Don't invest too much on this one. buy something simple and comfortable, so in case your design doesn't work out, you can wear the shirt as a PJ
2.Fabric Paint- I bought the cheapest ones - that include only basic colors- and that's ok because I'm going to show you how to mix them to obtain diversity.Here is a suggestion:

3.A sponge- again- nothing fancy- I'm using a dish washer sponge

You will also need a paint brush and some water.

 I'm not going into details with the whole process of painting because it's very well illustrated in the video down bellow. But here are some tips and tricks :

1. Since the T-shirt is black , don't paint colorful planets directly because they will not stand out. First paint some white circles  and use color on top of that.
2.Choose one of the circles to be a source of light -like a sun or a star-and paint the circle with a very light light yellow/orange. After that don't draw lines around it like in preschool.Use the sponge and tap around it. Use one layer of the same light color, one layer of white and again a layer of light color- but one on top of the other and not one next to each other.
3.If you have your source of light, imagine that it spreads light on the surrounding planets as well- so the light will touch the other planets perpendicular.
4. To illustrate that , paint the planets in blending shades of color.
For example if you want a green planet  :
       -First mix green with yellow or white and paint the top edge where the light from the sun "touches" the planet
       -Go further and paint bellow that an other layer of simple green
       -Mix green with blue and paint an other layer bellow the the anterior one.
       -Paint the opposite side of the lighted area (like the dark side of the planet) with a mix of black and green
       -Try to blend a little these layers where they touch each other

This advice is for 4 layered color planet but you can stick to basic of 3 layers :
-white + color
-color
-black + color

And that's about it. I hope you find this useful. Here is the video I promised :