After a bit of a break, I'm back on the planets again. Today it's Uranus.…
Neptune
This is the second in my series of paintings of the planets and today it’s Neptune. There was a question on University Challenge the other week about symbols associated with planets. One of the symbols was the head of a trident and I immediately called it out as Neptune. Stands to reason – Neptune was the Roman god of the sea. Well, that question stuck with me and I decided to do a painting of Neptune from one of its moons with a rocky formation that looked like a trident. I also decided to challenge myself by trying to suggest a face on Neptune, helped out by some hills in the foreground that looked like a beard and a ring viewed from underneath that might suggest the downward facing surface below the brow.
Colour–wise, it was a no brainier to go for the tundra supergranulators because the methane in Neptune’s atmosphere gives it blue and green colours and because it’s cold there. I also used titanium white and white gouache.
There’s not much to say about the the technique. I masked out the edges of the rings, the moons and the planets and spattered on some stars. I painted the background first and sprinkled out some salt and dabbed kitchen paper in places. Then I painted in Neptune and the background moon, then the foreground. I used all five colours everywhere except for in the sky where I stick to the purple, pink and blue. The more interesting stuff is all the tinkering that I did afterwards.
The sky didn’t need any tinkering and the background moon just needed some white down the left (first titanium, then gouache) to help it show up against the background.
Neptune ended up taking a lot of layers and has ended up darker than I was hoping for as a result. My problem was that the hidden face just wasn’t emerging. I have up at the point you see here, with a couple of dark blue spots for eyes, two latitudinal blue bands that are slightly darker where the top lip and shadow under the bottom lip would be and a wide latitudinal band that switches between green and pink in an attempt to suggest a nose. I considered putting a tree on the top of the hill and using it to suggest a nose but decided not to introduce any life to the moon.
The foreground also gave me problems, the biggest of which was that it was too similar a value to Neptune and that there was no suggestion of a beard. I took a break for a walk in the middle of the painting and got back having decided that the addition of snow to the top of the hills might act as a mitigant, even if there probably isn’t any water on Neptune’s moons. So I added snow in white gouache, a much easier job than doing the same thing with titanium white watercolour. I got a bit carried away with the snow but did notice that it gave the impression of waves in the sea, which could only be a good thing, so tried encourage this.
Finally, I went over the ring with white gouache, giving the near side a pinkish tint and the far side a blueish one. And that was me done.
I don’t mind this one and it’s going up for sale. The sky, including the distant moon, is off the charts. And the suggestions of the trident, the sea and the face make things interesting, even if the face is too subtle. Or is it not subtle enough? I can’t tell.
One lesson from this one, though, is that the best hidden faces are accidental ones. Check out Horsehead Quarry, The Hidden Gorilla and The Magic Purple Tree Only Appears At Sunset.
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