[Vazchu]

Hello there, it's been ages. Here Vaz comes again with a doodle while being sick at home. And I've been looking through my gallery a lot lately, thus I realized that I never got far with the tutorial stuff I had plans of doing. The descriptions for each step will be below, since I didn't have enough space left to write anything (and I'm not very good at writing with the computer mouse).

And there's no need to ask if you may use this tutorial for your paintings, just use it if you feel like trying it. (:
Also, this is just how I have been painting nebulas since I started using this oekaki painter, there's probably lots of other ways to do it.

Step 1
Start with a plain black background and choose a bunch of colours you like. Some darker and some lighter.
I went with turquoise and blue shades this time.
Start sketching out the lighter parts on a new layer (in case you want to add in more shades to the plain black background later) of your nebula with the darkest shade you chose.

I usually use a round soft brush around size 6-10 at this point. Sometimes I add around 25% of "scattering" on it. And also have the opacity quite low, what you use is up to your preference though.

Step 2-4
Keep building up the lighter parts of the nebula and switch to the lighter shades as you do. I did this while using the turquoise shade.
Still size 6 on the brush after a while and stopped using "scattering". Still on low opacity.

Step 5
I moved on to the darker blue shade, this one I had on even lower opacity (around 15%) and also started to add some of it in the darker areas where I previously hadn't added any colour yet.
Size on the brush is 4 and and still soft round and I have stopped using "scattering" completely at this point.

Step 6
As step 2-4, but with the blue shades with the difference that I use size 4 on the brush instead. Keep building the lighter areas.

Step 7
Now I define the lightest parts of the nebula with a round soft brush at size 3, very low opacity still and build it up in layers instead until you reach the lightness you desire.

Step 8
Time for stars! Make a new layer on top of the one with your stardust. Switch to a completely white color and hard edge on a round brush. I usually put the neutron stars in the center of the nebula. And I tend to differ from 1-3 neutron stars. Then I add some medium sized stars around the stardust and slowly move to smaller sizes. I add them randomly without thinking much. It's really just the large ones that make the most amount of light I decide already while sketching out the darkest shade of starlight that I know where I want them to be.
You should have as high opacity as possible, no "scattering", and for the larger stars I decide the size of the brush based on how large the area is of the nebula. The small and medium sized stars I always use size 1-4 on though. The smaller the stars are, the more I make. So I make way more stars in brush size 1 than what I do in size 4.

Step 9
Duplicate your star layer and make sure it's underneath the first one. Go to "Effects" and then "Box blur". The higher number you put in the first row where it says "Blur amount (pixels)" of the window that pops up, the more blur you will add to your stars. I usually start with a quite low number to start with a rather "sharp" blur since this will be the stars shining aura around them. And the first one I always want to have a tad sharper shine to them.
With that done, I make sure "Lock transparency" is selected for the blur layer. Then I select a more yellowish colour and paint the blur yellow. After that I play around with the lighting settings at the very top in the layer box. Usually I end up picking "add" or "lighten" depending on what looks best together with the nebula I'm drawing.

Duplicate the original star layer and do the same process again, at the new layer at the very bottom of your star layers and add more blur to this one to get a wider shine.

This step can be repeated as many times you feel it's needed, I tend to do it only two-four times though. For this particular one I only made two shine-layers. And when I'm done with the shine for the stars I usually merge the layers together. Though beware that this may cause some difference in the light!

Step 10
Here I felt the background of the nebula was missing something, so below the dust layer I added some dark green colours above the plain black background, before merging them together when I was happy with it.

Step 11
Now it's time for more dust, though this time it's the dust that's covering the nebula from our view. Add a new layer on top of both the dust and star shines and stars. I picked a very dark-blue gray shade that's almost black. With a soft round brush at size 6 I started putting out clouds of dust randomly around my nebula. I had rather high opacity, though still had it so I would have to paint more than once at each spot while I decided where I wanted to dust.

Step 12
When you're satisfied with the dust, it's time to start adding some highlights to it around the edges. Here I picked my two lightest shades of blue. Using a brush at size 4 at the begging and very low opacity I started going around the edges almost everywhere with the darkest one of the two blue colours. I went further in where the tips of the dust where, and when I started using the lighter one I only put it at the edges, more on the ones that are turned right towards the brightest stars.

And with that you're done with your nebula!