A Glimpse into the Stellar Painting Process

I promised a post on the creation process for my series of stars, and though I've been distracted by other things I've finally found time to write one. The entire painting process took almost two months, so I thought it might be interesting to see it in photos.

I started the entire series with the giant O-type star, and took the following three photos during the first session. Here it is as I was applying a layer of titanium white (like I did with my second star, the B-type in the video I made.)

Initially I wasn't sure how purple to go with it, so I started conservatively with a layer of blue before adding any purple. This was kind of my first time really using a deerfoot brush and I went a bit overboard with the paint splotches; I'd use a much lighter touch with more feathery character later on, but at the time I thought it was a great effect.

It's funny to think how elated I was with this first version (seen below at the end of the first painting session); I thought it was just the coolest star I'd seen at that point. I've spent many hours on it since and I think the final version is far superior, but it was still fun to see how even a few hours could get something that made me think of a star.

In retrospect, the blue was too much, or at least, too far from violet. I came to this conclusion after I started on the B-type star, after I looked at them together as seen in the picture below. I realized I could make each star be more tightly centered around a smaller part of the color range and it'd still be fine. Though trying to mask out some of the blue in the O-type is what lead me to the serendipitous discovery that making snaking white lines over the surface made the star look a lot hotter and more dynamic, so it all worked out in the end.

 

This next picture is what the A-type star looked like at first: almost completely white, with just the faintest tinge of pale blue. Originally the A-type and F-type were going to be very nearly completely white, just slightly tinted towards blue and yellow, respectively. To help, the A-type would have titanium white as a base (which is blueish) while the F-type would have antique white (which is slanted more towards yellow). After doing more of the other types I realized I could differentiate them a bit more, and I think they were both improved by that decision.

Here's a shot of my very first time using textures gels. The top is ceramic stucco texture, for the F-type, and the bottom is resin sand for the G-type. (This is before I added any colors.) This was such a mind-blowing experience that I ended up writing a whole post about it

Here's what the F-type star originally looked like, showing the ceramic stucco texture gel. It was very “mustard yellow” initially, which I toned down a bit towards white (the opposite of what I did for the A-type, funnily enough). It's still yellow now, but more mellow.

Finally, this photo is of the custom gel mixture of heavy gloss gel and glass beads that I whipped up for the O- and B-type stars. I had a pre-mixed glass beads gel with some little tiny beads that I used on all the stars, but for these two biggest ones I also used some larger glass beads (about the size of a BB) as well. I took this right after mixing it up as I was starting to apply it to the paintings, though it's hard to make out the glass beads amongst the white gel. You can see the O-type painting in the background.

Hopefully this gives a little insight into the creative process. I showed off the completed paintings, but it took some time—quite a lot of time for the O-type especially—to come to fruition. That's one of the benefits of painting, I suppose; much like writing, you can go back and edit and improve (to a greater or lesser extent, anyway)! A hui hou!