And here they are, all together. Spock, Kirk and Scotty. None of them brilliant individual…
The Face Of Mars
Another day, another planet. My latest idea for planet paintings (to go with the ideas of random surrealness and Roman gods) is to think about features and properties of individual planets and how to turn these into creative ideas. Today’s planet is Mars and I’d been thinking about the famous face on the Martian landscape that’s been photographed a few times by passing Terran satellites and looks like an alien construction but is really nothing special. I’ve blown up the face to a huge size, so huge that it might have looked silly on a spherical planet, so I’ve turned Mars and its two moons into cubes.
I stared by drawing in all three bodies in two point perspective. I didn’t want everything to look neat and tidy, so I put the nearest edges of the moons at non vertical angles. I’m not sure what I was supposed to do with the vanishing points of the moons but in both cases I moved one up and one down, keeping then directly above and below Mars’ vanishing points while in all three cases keeping the line between the vanishing points perpendicular to the nearest edge. I’ll have to check online what I was supposed to do at some point as I don’t have any books on perspective.
I went for the desert supergranulators today because of Mars’ red colour and supplemented them only with titanium white and white gouache at the end.
After getting a bit frustrated last week with how difficult it was to remove masking fluid from my current bottle, I decided to only spatter it over the paper for stars and to not bother protecting the three body shapes. Being quite well behaved, convex shapes, it shouldn’t be too difficult to paint around them anyway.
As usual the sky background went down first. I started with desert green and grey, the two dark colours in the set, but then also dropped in some of the yellow, orange and brown. The green and grey that I mixed were quite watery and came out quite lightly valued. The planets came out darker valued than the sky but, to be honest, I had no value plan in mind today and if the sky had come out darker I’d have made the planets lighter.
And then it was onto the planets. I think all nine faces showing had at least three layers of paint on them. I imagined light coming from the top left (as this matched the light source for the face photo I was using) so I tried to put four of the faces in shadow. At some point I realised that the weird orientations of the bodies made them look like tumbling dice, so I encouraged this a little by dabbing in some crater marks to look like spots.
I had the most trouble with Mars itself. Not the face (that worked our well) but with the dark side, where I tried to paint in shadowy shapes to suggest a crater that was in the same source photo as the face. But somehow, while the shadows on the face worked perfectly, those on the shadowy side never succeeded in defining the crater. So I removed most of the paint from that side and just made it shadowy.
I finished off with some titanium white and then white gouache to add some highlights on the top edges and on the face, and that was me done.
This one works for me and is up for sale. The background sky is amazing – once again it’s the people at Schmincke who mix these paints that have to take credit for that. The face works too, being right on that border of ambiguity between a face and some random shadows that look like a face. Just as it should be. If there’s anything wrong with this. It’s that there’s so much empty space, but that what it’s like out there. I could claim to have captured the emptiness of space in this one.
Oh, and someone pointed out in Facebook that the sky background looks like the surface of Mars. Which makes things even better. This one can be interpreted in two ways: either as three celestial bodies in space or three dice on the surface of the planet.
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