Moon-painting

I've finished my second painting project, a picture of the waxing crescent Moon illuminated by Earthshine. This one only took about a month, compared to my first one which took three, for a few reasons:

1. This one is only 40x40 cm rather than 80x80 cm, or a quarter of the size of the first one.
2. It uses a much more restricted palette (number of colors), mostly because:
3. It's based on an actual astrophoto someone else took that I used as reference.

In fact it would have been finished even sooner, but for the SciCoder workshop last week leaving me no time to paint until Saturday. Still, it's finished now, and I'm pretty happy with it.

I only have one in-progress photo for this one; partly I forgot to take more, partly I chose not to because there often weren't significant differences between painting sessions.

You may be able to pick out, in the still un-painted areas, the pencil marks I sketched as a guide.

Here it is in progress, after two sessions; the first one I painted the sunlit side and maria (dark lava plains) there, and the second I started filling in the dark side highlands. It was interesting doing this one because I used a very restricted palette; white, black, gray, and one or two different types of blue.

And here's the finished product. I think this one looks a bit better from a distance, hence the wider shot of it hanging up in my kitchen. (The house I'm living in, very conveniently, has a ton of ready-made hooks for hanging things all over the walls.)

North is up in the painting so this is roughly how it'd look in the northern hemisphere, partly because I'm used to seeing it that way and partly because that's how the photo I painted it from looked. But you could easily flip it upside down to have a southern hemisphere view.

Anyway, it was a fun project, and interesting to paint with a restricted range of colors. I've already got several ideas in my head for future paintings, so we'll see which ones come to fruition first. Two weeks ago I discovered that the local art shop (where I'm now on a first-name basis with several of the employees) sells little 8×10 inch canvases by the 10-pack, so I've picked up one of those and have some Christmas presents to start painting… A hui hou!