In my ongoing program to master Photoshop as an artistic medium, I assigned myself an "astronomical," the trade term for a space picture. "Astronomicals" depict anything that's out there in the big wide universe, usually involving space, stars, planets, moons, comets, and so forth.

I used to produce lots of small space pictures, using acrylic on illustration board. I sprayed them with an airbrush and added details with a spatter brush and by hand. If I had time, I would add a planet, moon, asteroid or a spaceship. I made these pictures in "editions" of up to twenty at a time, all of them small jobs of about 10 inches by 7 inches. And I could sell them in bulk, too. One time many years ago I sent an edition of about 7 to a show in California and the same collector bought them all. Some of my editions ran to twenty pieces, and I sold every one of them at one convention or another. They didn't cost much, but they also didn't take much time to produce; usually just one or two hours, depending on whether I put a planet in it which I had to hand-paint.

This same painting process can be duplicated exactly in the digital image program of Photoshop. I "spray" airbrush color on a black background, adding "spatter" spots with another computer-generated "brush." Then I add in a planet and model it by hand, using other "texture" effects and applying them with a digital drawing tablet. One of the advantages of using Photoshop (or other programs such as Painter) is that you can add the planet or the spaceship or whatever on another "layer," an overlay which can be kept different from the background. You can choose to work on this overlay by itself without doing any changes to the background. You couldn't do this in acrylic unless you painted your planet on a clear sheet of acetate and overlaid it mechanically. This was done in the past for commercial work.

You might think that computer art especially for these small astronomical scenes would take less time than painting it by hand. After all, it's mechanical and should be labor-saving and quick, right? Well, it turned out that making my space scene in Photoshop took just as much time as painting it in real acrylic, that is, if I wanted it to look good. That means about two hours. The advantage of Photoshop is that it's easily changeable and it takes up no physical space. But the advantage of real acrylic is that you have a single and unique piece which a collector can buy and frame. Unless you follow some harsh gallery rules where you have to destroy the original file after printing just one copy of a digital piece, a Photoshop artwork can never be better than a print.

Here's my first complete astronomical scene done with Photoshop. By the way, it occurs to me that this Electron Blog is becoming more of an art blog and less of a math and science blog. I hope you don't mind. There's plenty of both to go around.

Space scene with chilly moon; Photoshop, original size 11" x 8.5".

Posted at 3:43 am | link