Port Jackson Pup

I like the Port Jackson shark.  It's a goofy little shark that lives around the coasts of Australia.  They grow to 30-36 inches in length and use their broad, flat teeth to crush and eat mollusks and echinoderms.  You can read more about them on their page at the Australian Museum's website.

I drew the outline in HB and laid down the lightest layers in 2H and HB.  I reinforced the darker areas (the harness patterns and overshadowed tail section) with another layer of HB.  Then I put down the darkest areas with a 4B pencil.  The final steps were shading in a minimal background in 2H, and using the 2H pencil to burnish the dark areas to make them less grainy and smoother.

This was another step in my practice for my upcoming creature design class.  Tune in next time for another animal drawing.

Orion Nebula

I started this painting nearly a year ago (last October, to be precise), when I was painting several variations of the Orion Nebula.  What inspired me was a false-color image of the Nebula's "tracer bullets"–globs of stellar dust shooting across space–colored in bright orange and blue.  You can read more about the tracer bullet phenomenon in this article by the Faulkes Telescope Project.

The original reference image.

There was some pre-planning to this painting, but not a lot.  I was afraid I would procrastinate on it and end up not doing it out of various fears, so I pushed ahead as fast as I could.  The lack of pre-planning made certain stages later on more difficult.  Even so, I do not regret starting it so quickly.

This was not a complicated painting.  I had the blue-and-orange Nebula, and the astronaut and his spacecraft.  I went back and forth painting layers for the Nebula and the dark blue of deep space, and the spacecraft.  Halfway through the painting, the orange and the blue were mixing together and becoming a muddy green.  I went back, whited the muddy parts out, and repainted them.  The final stages of the painting were lighting up the blue nebula bullets, and adding the off-white highlights on the astronaut and spacecraft.

What I learned from this painting:

• Prime the canvas the main background color.  This prevents the bright white canvas from throwing off how colors appear to your eyes.
• Develop the underpainting as much as you need to.  It is the foundation your painting will stand on.  I did not develop it for this painting, and it made finishing the spacecraft much more difficult.
• Don't leave your wet palette alone for weeks on end.  The paint becomes runny and useless for painting.  The palette gets smelly and moldy, and you have to delay working on the painting in order to clean the paper and sponge.

With these lessons in mind, I can do that much better on the next space painting.

Detail images of the painting below.