Painting a Volcano Is Like Making a Volcano: Layers Upon Layers

Last month I teased a project I've been working on for a while, and having finished it this week I'm finally ready to reveal it:

I've taken up painting (with acrylics)! And I've finished my first painting!

I mused about taking up painting in this post back in June, having found the experience of painting my YTLA model at the beginning of the year to be very soothing and enjoyable. Back in August we restarted our weekly art workshops at Swinburne with our artists-in-residence Pam and Carolyn, and I decided to go for it—and I'm ultimately really glad I did, as I've found it to be incredibly rewarding.

For my first painting, I wanted to paint a picture that I've had in my head since at least 2012, back when I was working at the Visitor Information Station on Mauna Kea. It was inspired by my reading about how Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa used to host year-round glacial ice caps, and also erupted underneath those glaciers. A picture came into my mind of the summit of Mauna Kea, snow-clad, looking south towards Mauna Loa similarly covered in ice, at night with the (northern hemisphere) summer Milky Way rising majestically above while a fountain of lava erupts from Mauna Kea's summit through a crack in the ice.

I'd originally wanted to do this using Blender, like some previous projects of mine, but I just never got around to it after I started working full time so I decided I'd try doing it as my first painting project. Probably far too ambitious for a beginner like me, but you can judge how it turned out for yourself. Since I enjoy seeing the creative process I took a bunch of photos throughout the entire three-month creation period, so you can watch the entire process as it unfolded.

Here it is, my first swatch of paint applied to canvas, August 21, 2018. (Though I also spent two weeks before this applying two coats of gesso—essentially a primer layer of white paint mixed with chalk which serves as a good base for future paint layers.) Not much to look at yet, but you can see the outline of Mauna Loa and Hualālai (on the right) starting to take shape already. There's a curious thrill of trepidation that comes when holding a loaded paintbrush poised over a blank canvas; the feeling of permanence and lack of an undo option combine to make it a bit nerve-wracking even when doing nothing more complicated than a flat black night sky!

Next, I added the glacier atop Mauna Loa. The glaciers were probably the most difficult part of this project for me, as I've never seen one personally so I had to rely on photos and my own ideas of how ice looks. I think this one atop Mauna Loa came out pretty well, at least.

Of course, even personal familiarity with a subject doesn't guarantee I'll paint it well. I painted a lot of the early stages from my mental picture without reference photos, and I definitely could've done a better job with the slopes of Mauna Loa and Hualālai with some visual references. Still, this session was interesting for mixing a few different colors to play with. I'm not using pretty much any colors straight from the tube (other than the black background, and maybe some of that gray), rather I'm mixing them to start to get a grip on color mixing theory as it applies to acrylic paint.

Moving into September I finished off the slopes of Mauna Loa and Hualālai. I mixed even more shades of colors this time and started layering them over older ones, which led me to the striking realization that making a volcano and painting a volcano are very similar processes; just layers upon layers!

Almost immediately upon actually putting paint to canvas at the beginning I realized I was enjoying the process far too much to wait for weekly workshop sessions, so I quickly started working on my own throughout the week. I had a short time available for this session so I added a cloud on the left approaching from the east and crossing the Saddle. (Spoilers: I wasn't happy with it almost immediately upon finishing it, so it'll change later.)

Next session, I tackled the snow-covered summit of Mauna Kea in the foreground. A sharp-eyed inspection of this photo will reveal that it's upside-down, as I rotated the canvas on the easel so that I could paint along the bottom edge of it. It turned out to be an interesting artistic exercise, actually; I painted the smaller cinder cone on the left entirely upside-down, and am still happy with how it came out. I wasn't very happy with the glacier as a whole though, so you'll see it getting reworked.

Case in point: here I've gone over most of the foreground to try to both merge it more naturally from side to side and also introduce some feeling of contours to help define the shape. The cinder cones got some working over, too. They're actually based on real cinder cones still extant at the summit, though I didn't copy them particularly closely. The large one on the left is Puʻu Wēkiu, the eastern rim of which is today the highest point on Mauna Kea; the one behind it is Puʻu Haukea, a relatively recent cinder cone going by its not-yet-significantly-weathered dark gray color; and the one on the right is Puʻu Poliʻahu, named after one of the Hawaiian goddesses of snow. It's very close to the present-day location of the JCMT, and has a much more weathered and irregular profile now than I've painted it here.

At this point I finally started looking up references for what Mauna Kea looked like when snow-covered nowadays, and realized that photos usually showed black rocks sticking out from the snow, especially around rims and ridges. I went a little overboard with it here (and dialed it back later), but I think it definitely helps to define parts of the space better.

I was never entirely happy with the cloud I'd added, nor the center part of the foreground glacier, so in one session I redid both of them. I think it was around now that I started realizing that the composition didn't really have space for a lava fountain like I'd originally intended, but I was still on the fence about including one eventually at this point.

Instead, I decided to expand! Pam encouraged me to add a second canvas to the sky to better capture the Milky Way, and I'm really glad I took her advice. Actually painting the Milky Way was an interesting and exhausting process, as I did it by spattering paint on the canvas to make stars. (I blocked off the foreground beforehand so it wouldn't be affected.) In what's turning out to be a recurring theme, I wasn't happy with the initial look of it and spent a few sessions reworking it…

Coming into October, I went back and spattered more stars on the canvas, though I made the same mistake as before and tried to paint in the Milky Way's dust lanes from my head rather than from a reference. You might have noticed that the quality of these photos, especially regarding glare, changes a lot; it depended on if I took them in the evening after working on them under electric light, or in the morning the next day when there was daylight. Large expanses of black like the night sky here were especially difficult to properly represent the darkness of.

It's not easy to see in the photo, but I've gone and hand-painted in all the brightest stars that one could reasonably see with the naked eye based on the perspective and time of year. The center of the Milky Way roughly coincides with the center of the top canvas, so Sagittarius, Scorpius, and Corona Australis are all visible, with a bit of Lupus on the right and a few other constellations having one or two stars appearing. And being the stickler that I am, I actually painted them with colors corresponding to their spectral types. This session turned out to be surprisingly grueling, trying to put the stars in the right places based on a star map using Stellarium. I also added a few nebulae as well; the largest pink patch near the center is the Lagoon Nebula, while just above it is the Trifid Nebula. You can also see that I've subtly whited out bits of the black rims of the cinder cones to make them blend in a bit more.

I was worried that the hand-painted stars wouldn't stand out all the much from the background splatter stars, until a few days later when I noticed an interesting thing: up close to the canvas you can see all the faint background stars, but step back a few paces and it all disappears into the blackness of the night, leaving the hand-painted stars as the only ones to be seen! I definitely didn't plan that, but it works really well, and is an interesting lesson in how a painting can be seen differently at different distances; a dynamic I hadn't really appreciated from my previous experience doing artwork on a computer where you generally only look at something from a fairly fixed, nearby distance.

Finally, in one mammoth two-and-a-half-hour session I went over the Milky Way again by hand, adding gossamer stars clouds and actual dust lanes from reference photos. I spent so long looking at the Milky Way, in fact, that I now immediately recognize structures in the dust lanes in other photos from having painted them. There are still some factually incorrect dust lanes in there, but it's much more realistic now. And at this point I realized that I was satisfied with it. I could keep tinkering with it and adding more details, but I was also fine with calling it finished (I also finally decided against adding any eruption activity). I did one last session on Pam's suggestion to add a bit more color to reflect the color of the Milky Way in the ice and to push Mauna Loa more into the background, and the result is:

My first painting is complete! I varnished it just this week. The lighting on this photo is, once again, pretty terrible, but it gives a decent idea of what it's like. Together the two canvases are 80×80 centimeters (31×31 inches), so it's reasonably large. I call it “Mauna Kea a me Mauna Loa ma lalo o ka lani hōkū (Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa beneath the starry heavens).”

It feels amazing to have finally finished it, and I've received lots of nice comments on it from people. I've really dived into painting, as I've found it to be way more fun and engaging than I had expected. I've picked up a number of tubes of paint and brushes, and even a palette knife which looks like a tiny trowel and reminds me of doing archaeology! I've been reading up on techniques and painting terms, and checking out the paintings of famous painters with a new eye. (I'm thankful for a decent amount of art history in my education, but I'm learning there are so many painters I've never even heard of!)

Now that I've finally cleared that picture from my head I find another one has arisen to take its place. People have also given me some ideas for others (like a series of planetary landscapes around the solar system), so we'll see what comes next. But one thing's for sure: I expect this to be a hobby for years to come. A hui hou!