Space As I Promised

Space painting is fun and easy. You should do it. Really. Here is a lovely young lady to show you a fast and easy way to paint nebulae.



I tried this technique painting the bug nebula. Some call it the butterfly nebula but scientists call it bug and so will I. Here is a picture of the bug nebula taken by NASA:

You can see why some call it the butterfly nebula. Anyway, here is my terrible rendition of the bug nebula:

The green was supposed to be underneath the pink and red but the pink and red did not have the covering power. Still, so much fun to paint.


I also painted the Milky Way. I did not use the lovely Empathy Film's technique. I did sort of a free-hand, off the top of my head type dealie and was very proud of myself when two separate people knew it was the Milky Way on sight.

Here's where I point out that photographs of space paintings are non-representational. At least mine are. Some paintings look lovely in real life but take horrible pictures. Some are pieces of crap IRL but photograph beautifully. I could not get a good picture of The Milky Way to save my life. But this picture of the very, very bad painting of aurora borealis does not at all convey how awful this painting really is.

This painting is worse than paint-over bad. It's burn the canvas bad.

I was waiting until I had the whole solar system down before I made a Space entry, but as I have mentioned, painting has fallen by the wayside while I struggle with getting down perhaps a grand total of 15,000 words in a very simple story. From Monday until right now at this very moment, I have gotten down 1872 words. I know because Word very helpfully mocks me with this fact every time I open it.

Now on to the solar system-- my second and third paintings ever were the sun and the moon. Don't remember which order. They came out nice. I must say, I've gotten much better at blending my shading since I did the moon. Still, I kinda like the stark rings around it.

Since then I've been having astrological problems with my space paintings. Take Mars for example.

I painted stars in the shadowed part of the planet, as if you can see stars through Mars. It took me quite a while to figure out why, although my Mars came out pretty well, there was something very off about this painting.


My lack of an astrophysiology degree again rears it's stupid-ass head with Jupiter and Io.

It was supposed to be Jupiter and a very distant Neptune (why Neptune and not Saturn? Because I don't know how to paint rings), only that isn't distant at all. In fact, it's too close to Jupiter to be Io. Actually it is to close to Jupiter to live and far, far too large.  What do I know about proportion and perspective? Apparently, about as much as I know about astrophysics.


As is evidenced by my Neptune's Moon.

What gave me the silly idea that it would be cloudy on Neptune's moon? This time I'm giving myself an out. Triton does have a thin nitrogen and methane atmosphere. So that explains the haze.

That's it. I don't know when I'll finish the solar system. After another 13,000 words AND I learn how to paint planetary rings.