Create a Watercolor Galaxy Effect in Adobe Photoshop

If you love lettering and watercolors, you’ve probably come across the watercolor galaxy effect. Whether just as a beautiful texture, or incorporated into lettering, it’s eye catching. Made from a variety of cloud-like colorful textures, it’s further detailed with doodled stars. There’s nothing like creating this traditionally with watercolors, but you can achieve this same look in Photoshop. In this tutorial, I take you through my process of creating and applying this watercolor galaxy effect to lettering, all within Photoshop. This is a bit of an advanced tutorial, so we’ll move through things quicker and with less detail than usual since there’s a lot to cover. Let’s dive into this galaxy!

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Here’s an overview of how we made a watercolor galaxy effect in written form:

Scan your black lettering and remove any white by magic wanding > select > similar > delete.
Place your first watercolor texture and keep it a normal blend mode. Be sure the texture covers the entire lettering and apply a clipping mask.
Duplicate your texture, reposition and change the blend mode to ‘darken’.
Apply a black background color to your document.
Duplicate your black lettering layer and position it above both texture layers. Change the blend mode to ‘overlay’ at 60% opacity and apply a clipping mask.
Bring in your splatter textures. Change the color overlay to white and apply an outer glow. Outer glow settings: blend mode of screen, opacity 50%, spread 15% and size 12px.
Create multiple copies of your splatter textures, alter rotations, scale and opacities. Continue until you’re satisfied with their randomness within the lettering. Make sure all splatter layers also have a clipping mask applied.
Create a new document, sized 200px by 200px, resolution of 300. Use the pen tool to create a star shape in black. With it selected go edit > define brush preset and save it as a brush.
Create a new layer in your galaxy file and brush the newly made star, changing its size. Apply an outer glow layer style, similar to the splatter textures. Apply a clipping mask to your star layer.
Add depth within the letters if desired.
At the very bottom of your layers palette, create a new layer and place a galaxy stock photo just above your black background layer. Change its blend mode to ‘color dodge’ with an opacity of 50%.
Done!