How to Paint A (Specific Spectral Class of) Star

I said in my previous post that I don't like revealing projects in progress, but my current project is so cool that I can't resist. Plus, it's more like a series of projects so I don't mind revealing one that I've completed.

I've decided to do a series of seven paintings of the various spectral types of stars. I'm only doing main sequence stars for now, as this allows me to paint them all to scale and I love those kinds of visual comparisons. (People keep asking me about other types of stars such as white dwarfs or supergiants, and my response has been a firm “We'll see.” I can't really paint those to the same scale so I don't think I'd be able to do them justice, but perhaps something will come up.)

This past Wednesday I painted the second star in the series, a B-type star, and had the idea of filming the process to make a time lapse video of it. It came out so well that I decided to add some commentary explaining my creative process, since it's informed by things like thermodynamics and stellar structure (while still retaining a fair amount of artistic license, of course).

Anyway, here's the video! Painting while conscious of being filmed was an interesting challenge, but I think the finished product is pretty good. Enjoy!

Healesville Sanctuary Trip the Second

Well, it's been nearly a month since my family departed back to California and things have mostly settled back into a familiar routine. I was a bit trepidatious about getting back to work on my research after a month away, but it turned out to be surprisingly easy to pick up where I'd left off; I think the re-writing of my code I've been doing after the SciCoder workshop in November has paid off with more easily-understandable and maintainable code. Our weekly art workshops at Swinburne have resumed and I've gotten back into painting regularly again; I've picked up a bunch of new paint and painting supplies and I've got several exciting projects in progress and ideas for several more, but I'm going to wait till they're finished before showing them off here so that'll be a post for another time!

For today, though, I have a few pictures from the trip we took to Healesville Sanctuary:

Here's one of an endangered Regent Parrot eating out of a dish I'm holding in one of the several aviaries at the sanctuary.

And here's a Red-Tailed Black Cockatoo!

This is an echidna, something I don't remember seeing in my trip to the sanctuary last year. This one was pretty funny, as for the entire time we watched it never stopped waddling around its enclosure (for what reason we were unable to determine).

And finally, me with some native Australian fauna I found in the gift store on the way out.

I've got a lot more pictures to go through so there are more coming, and hopefully I'll have the next ones up with less of a wait in between. A hui hou!