Twinkle Twinkle Little Star Painting

In my last post I mentioned that I've been working on a series of seven paintings of stars of the different spectral types on the main sequence, and while I'm still somewhat reluctant to talk about in-progress projects I just came home from such an absolutely amazing painting session that I simply must talk about it a bit, and I'm incredibly excited to get in to uni tomorrow to see how everything looks when it dries.

This entire project has been fertile ground for experimentation. Freed from the constraints of trying to paint something familiar, I've been trying out some of the possibilities of acrylic paint, and the results so far have been mind-blowing when it comes to what kinds of effects you can achieve with paint. Or, with acrylic paint, what you can achieve by mixing in various gels and mediums. Something I've been itching to try for a while are texture gels; acrylic base (basically colorless paint) with various kinds of things added to it to give it a texture, such as stucco, or (natural or artificial) sand, or even bits of pumice.

I've been trying out stucco and resin sand textures in the smaller stars and been immensely pleased with how they came out, as they give the stars an eye-catching but not obtrusive three-dimensionality. Today I tried another texture gel I've been eyeing, one with tiny glass beads mixed in. I used a tiny amount on my smallest star, and the initial results were so promising that I've added it to the next four larger ones. It took longer to dry than I felt like staying tonight so I left it to dry overnight, but I can hardly wait to see how it looks in the morning.

One thing I've been trying for was a sense of dynamism, a feeling that the star is alive as you shift your viewpoint of it, which I've hitherto achieved by using a lot of iridescent medium in the paint to make it sparkle as it catching the light. By embedding tiny glass spheres in the paint layer (and building it up to be a bit more 3D) I'm hoping to amplify this effect as they refract light as you move around, and the merest initial glimpse I caught of the potential suggests it should be pretty amazing.

I realize I'm raving about something with no pictures to show for it, but you'll just have to take my word for it for now: this should be a spectacular sight when I'm done with the project. As to when that'll happen exactly I don't know, but it shouldn't be more than a few more weeks at most; I'm feeling better and better about each star, I've learned a ton about the immense possibilities of acrylic paint over the course of the project, and I think it'll really show in the finished product. But for now it's off to bed so I can shorten the time till I can see how they came out! A hui hou!