image

My weblog ELECTRON BLUE, which concentrated on science and mathematics, ran from 2004-2008. This weblog, which is more art-oriented, is its successor. Please visit the archives of ELECTRON BLUE using the link to the right.

Thu, 10 Dec, 2009

Nebula Aurora


During November of this year I did a series of small space pictures, painted with airbrush and conventional brushes. I've been doing these for many years, but not much recently. My airbrush is still usable, though it's a bit dusty and corroded. It seems almost archaic to use airbrush and paint to do space pictures, when you can do the same thing even better using digital media like Photoshop. But even in this digital age, collectors still like an artwork done with physical media and by hand. This piece is one of my recent series. It's called "Space Aurora." It features one of my favorite colors, the ecstatic, hallucinatory light blue-green I call "Aurora Green." Auroras happen because of energetic particles from the sun striking gases in the Earth's upper atmosphere and causing them to glow. There are no auroras in space, but there are emission nebulas, which are sort of the same, made of gases that glow when energized by light from a nearby star. This is an image of an emission nebula. "Space Aurora" is acrylic and colored pencil on illustration board, 10" x 8".

Posted at 3:17 am | link