Signing Off On Stars

Well, it's been a while coming—according to the photos I took, since February 13th—but I'm finally done with my star series of paintings! I finished signing the last one tonight along with some last-minute improvements, and I'm incredibly chuffed with how they turned out.

I'm not quite ready to show them off just yet, for the simple reason that I want to take my time and get some high-quality photos to do so. The various effects I've applied to them—such as the glass beads and iridescent medium—look amazing in the right light, but it's proven somewhat difficult to capture that effect on camera, especially since I'm usually snapping a hurried shot in the evening after cleaning up and just before rushing off to catch a train. I hope sometime this week to spend some time getting some high-quality photos, maybe even some animated GIFs to show off the sparkling effects of changing your viewing angle. (Maybe. We'll see how hard that proves.)

However, while I'm not quite ready to show off the finished paintings themselves, I do have a photo for you from tonight. I decided to sign each painting in a different color that complements the colors of the star, and while it means that signing took about seven times longer than it otherwise might've, I'm pretty happy with the results!

A stack of signatures.

(Yes, it took me almost a week to sign them all due to it taking a while and having limited time to paint. And yes, I messed up on a few of the small ones and had to wrap the date around to another side. Painting glyphs is hard! The canvas second from the bottom you might recognize as the B star from the video I made of its creation a few weeks ago, though I've since worked on it and it looks a lot better than it did at the end of the video.)

It's interesting going back over the photos I've taken along the way showing the work in progress; I'll definitely post some of those in the future. In what I'm discovering is my usual fashion, I went back and worked on some of these stars (especially the largest O-type one) over, and over, and over, to the point where people were telling me mock-seriously they thought I'd finished five times already. Which speaks to the quality of the intermediate stage I suppose, but I think the final results are undeniably better for it. But you can look at the in-progress pictures and judge for yourself when they come out! A hui hou!