Banana slug on a redwood tree

After all my May posts I got a bit tired of working on my banana slug painting (another reason I don't usually show off things I'm working on—too much self-inflicted pressure to finish), but I finally got around to finishing it over the past few weeks. There wasn't that much to do, actually, since the last photo I took, but I think I'm done with it now. (Of course I also thought that about my first slug painting and then heavily revised it twice, so we'll see if that feeling sticks!) Now, behold the second painting in what I hope to be my ongoing “Limax” collection:

“Banana Slug on Redwood,” acrylic on canvas, 14”×18”

This face-on photo unfortunately conceals the three-dimensional nature a but, but does reveal my secret inspiration behind the entire painting: the slime trail! Which came out looking crummy. I got the inspiration for it from my earlier solar twins painting, where I discovered almost by accident that a light brushing of iridescent medium makes for a pretty good imitation of the Milky Way's sheen…but also of a gastropod's slime trail if the light catches it right. I'm not sure why it worked in that painting and so well in this one. Possibly the color of the underlying background matters—in the previous painting the iridescence is on black, whereas here it's on a light reddish-brown. It might also suffer from my trying to paint a slug trail from memory based on the occasional snail trail I see around here when walking rather than from a reference photo. Oh well. I'm still pretty happy with the 3D aspects of the painting, and the bark came out pretty nicely too. (It might be interesting to try some more 3D bark sometime, too…) That's it for now, but I've already started on my next project, which I hope to have finished before too long. A hui hou!

Mercury: Birthday #133

Finally, rounding out this month of birthdays, it's Mercury's turn! And wow, 133! Over twice as high as Venus. Getting three Mercury birthdays per Earth year really puts in perspective just how fast it goes around the Sun (every 87.97 Earth days). There's an option, when setting up the planetary birthdays calendar, to skip every so many Venus and Mercury birthdays, but I don't want that. Being 133 on Mercury doesn't make me older—or feel any older—than I am, and I want to see just how many birthdays I can rack up there.

Much like Venus, Mercury has a rotational period much longer than an Earth day. It also exists in a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance with the Sun. This fact in particular makes figuring out how long my birthday has actually been happening on Mercury…complicated. A solar day on Mercury is 176 Earth days—even longer than Venus' 116.75—so in theory my Mercury!birthday has been going since mid-March (coincidentally around the time my current Venus birthday started, though it will outlast that one by going till almost mid-August…just in time for Mercury to make another lap around the Sun on August 24th). The whole concept of a birthday really kind of breaks down on Mercury, since laps around the Sun are twice as common as sunrises, so I think I'll end this speculation here.

Instead, let's get back to slugs! Er, slug paintings. If you remember from last time, I'd decided to build up the slug with some flexible modeling paste. I've done just that in this next photo…

…though it's admittedly hard to see a difference from the previous photo. Just trust me when I say that I've built up the body a bit, and also closed the gap between the front and rear parts. It now feels much more like a real presence on the canvas.

I felt that the modeling paste buildup was complete, so I moved on to painting. You might wonder why I'd need to do any painting, since I've been mixing some yellow paint in the modeling paste as I go along, but there are two reasons for it. For one thing, the modeling paste is very, very, viscous. You can see in the photo above that it preserves individual brushstrokes in incredible detail. Each session working with it requires a lot of time very carefully flattening its surface, trying to keep the most egregious ridges down. But this is a slug, and should be more smooth-looking! (Though banana slugs do actually have some mild texture on their latter two-thirds, which I still need to figure out how to represent.)

The second reason has to do with reflections. When dry, modeling paste is quite a matte material, meaning it doesn't reflect light in concentrated spots; it has diffuse, rather than specular reflection. It's the opposite of glossy, which is more like how we expect a slug to look. So the purpose of painting the modeling paste is two-fold: to smooth out some of the texture caught in the paste, and to give it a more glossy reflection.

And here it is after the first coat of glossy paint. This light isn't the best illustration (especially because, in the previous photo, the still-wet modeling paste also shows some weak specular reflection), but you can kind of see how it looks smoother and more glossy. Most paints are somewhere between glossy and matte, and I've got some gloss gel and some matte gel that can be added to tip the balance one way or the other. I used matte gel in the paint for the bark background, which should make the contrast with the glossy slug all the more obvious.

It's definitely coming along quite well and looking mighty nice, but I'm not done yet! I still have a few last little touches in mind, so there'll be (at least) one more post finishing up this journey. I also  unexpectedly* managed to get a video of the total lunar eclipse last night, so expect that soon as well. A hui hou!

*It'd been all or partly cloudy from a big weather front all day so I really didn't have much hope for the evening, but then it cleared up about an hour before the umbral portion of the eclipse began.

Earth: Birthday #32

Yes that's right, it's time for the big binarily-significant \(2^5\) birthday! Here on Earth anyway. Now there's just my Mercury birthday to wait for later this month. I don't have much more to say about it—you've heard the song and dance by now—so let's get back to talking about…

…this painting. If you remember from the previous post, I'd tried painting the shading of the slug from a picture, and decided I really didn't like the outcome. I then had the thought that perhaps this was a job for my favorite trick of putting some dimensionality into a painting by extruding it into the third dimension. It's unfortunately a little hard to tell due to the face-on angle of the above photo, but I've painted over the slug's body with some flexible modeling paste mixed with a little yellow paint. I immediately liked where this was going much better, so this'll be the new direction for this painting. I did another painting session adding more modeling paste to the posterior two-thirds of the slug's body, and tried to get a photo from a different angle that would show the topology a bit better:

It's still not the best lighting, but hopefully you can see how I've built up a kind of crest ridge along the back (as the real slugs indeed have). I need to go back over it and even it out with the front a bit, but I'm really enjoying this sort of…reverse-sculpting? The modeling paste is apparently marble dust in acrylic, so it's almost like the reverse of sculpting something out of a block of marble. One tricky aspect of the paste is that it's very plastic and easily retains brush strokes, so it's a very delicate process and when I've got it built out to where I want it I'll have to give it all a layer of paint to smooth it out a bit. Still, I suppose the little imperfections keep it from looking too perfect and give it some character. This photo's from the latest painting session a few days ago, so I'll have to get back to it to have something to show…for my next birthday! A hui hou!

Venus: Birthday #52

Today I have my 52nd birthday on Venus! Well, this Earth day. Days on Venus are a lot longer due to its slow rotation, and then when I looked it up I had to wrap my head around the difference between a sidereal day and a solar day again. On Earth, with its fast rotation, the difference between the two is only about 4 minutes. On Venus, with its slow retrograde rotation, the difference is about 126 Earth days.

Given that we generally mean solar day (the time between when the Sun reaches its highest point in the sky) rather than sidereal day (the time when a planet makes a full rotation with respect to the background stars) here on Earth, I'll do the same for Venus, which has a solar day of 116.75 Earth days. By that metric, it's been my birth“day” for almost two months (~58 days, so since mid-March) and will continue to be until early July. Which is pretty cool I suppose!

Anyway, continuing on with my in-progress painting, I'd left it with the beginnings of a bark texture. As mentioned, I didn't follow the color of my tree model, and that's because this is supposed to be a redwood tree. And on that redwood tree will be a majestic banana slug. I somewhat dislike giving away the final vision this early on, but as I started painting it in I can't show off more photos without revealing it. Nothing for it but let you all in on the process, I suppose!

Here, the big change from last time is actually not the beginnings of the slug I've started painting in, but the extra detail in the bark. I went over it again with a few colors, including gray. This turned out to be a much more important color than I'd anticipated, at it helped tone down the colors a bit and make them feel a bit more muted and natural, while making the saturated colors pop more.

Of course, the rough sketch of the slug is pretty eye-catching. I used some bismuth yellow to fill in an underlayer, and it turned out pretty fluorescent. A bit too fluorescent, so I painted it over with…

…this. I was attempting to do some shading from a photo, but A) I'm bad at shading, and B) it didn't exactly fit with the shadows from the bark. Almost every part of the slug here except for the outer fringe of its foot will be covered over…in the next post! Yes, I'll leave it here, and do some more work on it over the weekend. (Also, you might be able to see that I replaced the light bulb in my room with a brighter one in between the two photos.) Anyway, see you for my next birthday! A hui hou!

Redwoods…in Australia‽ Happy New Year!

Well, here's some trees I didn't think I'd see in Australia:

REDWOODS!

Yep, that's right, authentic Californian redwoods, Sequoia sempervirans, in the flesh. Er, in the bark. Back in the 1930s the Australian Board of Works planted a patch of land that had been cleared of its original eucalyptus forest with 1,500 redwood trees imported from California (along with Bishop pine and Douglas fir) in an experiment in hydrogrogy. (The experiment's results are, sadly, unknown.)

I got to experience this cool home-away-from-home forest due to some friends from church, who planned a New Year's Eve barbecue lunch with a bunch of other people out in the Yarra Valley about seven kilometers from the forest, which we explored afterwards.

They're not too big around yet, but they're already quite tall!

The redwoods are planted in regular rows, giving an interesting effect as you walk around. Otherwise, add a few banana slugs and you could almost be back in California! (At least until you get to the edge of the forest and see the old-growth eucalyptus forest all around.) I've got some other pictures from the trip that I'll post when I get a chance, but for now, I'll wish you all hauʻoli Makahiki Hou, and I'll see you all in 2018!

Edit (1/1/2018): Have a few more pictures I didn't have time to include last night:

The Yarra River, where we had the barbecue before going to the redwoods, in the beautiful Yarra Valley.

Most trees here are between 55 and 80 meters tall (180–288 feet).

One feature not usually present in Californian redwood forests are these large man-made bird nests.

And while there may not be any banana slugs here naturally, it's nothing a few minutes with GIMP can't fix!

(Banana slug picture from the last time I used the “redwoods” tag on this blog, all the way back in 2010!)

Memoirs of a family trip.

In contradistinction to my last post, I haven't been especially busy for the last week, other than a family trip to Mendocino County over the weekend. I've just been enjoying my vacation, and too lazy and unmotivated to write anything. I thought I'd post some pictures from the trip, though.

Banana slug near the hotel we stayed at.

We went to an old Russian fort, saw the famous Chandelier Tree that you can drive through, and toured a large botanical garden, but the coolest experience for me was at our unplanned stop to change drivers and stretch our legs at a random spot on Highway 1, deep in the coastal mountains.

A little mountain stream was making its merry way way down the valley not too far from the road, so we climbed down to investigate it. The majesty of the place was amazing -- coastal redwoods stretching hundreds of feet above our heads, the noon-day sun falling through chinks in between the branches in soft rays of cool sunlight, reminiscent of the grandeur and beauty of a cathedral. But pictures speak better than words sometimes, and I think this is one of those cases:

The stream at the bottom of the dell.

We also stopped at the Chandelier Tree, the famous tree that you can drive your car through. It was, unfortunately, too short to allow our huge van to pass through, but I got a nice shot of Abigail nosing it in before we were sure we couldn't make it.

She set her Facebook status to
 "Drove the van into a tree." when we got home.