Space Art

This week one of my space art pictures I created was published in the school newspaper. It was done back in 2008, when I first realized that due to open-source computer graphics programs, making high-quality graphical art was no longer just for dedicated professionals. The realization that I could, on my own, with a bit of work invested, create pictures (of astronomical subjects, primarily) that could hold their own in an art contest was quite intoxicating.

Fictitious Solar System 3: moon around gas giant.

At that point my work was entirely 2-D. I had had GIMP installed on my computer for a while but one day while browsing its website I came across a plugin that would automatically create simple planets. I was hooked. I figured out how to draw stars (and yes, every one of those stars is hand drawn) and nebulae and within a couple of weeks had turned out several (O.K., 3) pictures of fictional solar systems. That's basically what sparked the interest I have in computer graphics that I have to this day. It was only a few months later that I found out about Blender and graduated to 3-D modeling. I made one rather forgettable picture of an astronomical nature with it before getting busy with school and work, and running into snags with the next project I had in mind, which remains uncompleted to this day. Maybe I should brush it off and have another try sometime...

Edit: And here's that self-same project, finished a few months later!