A Slug and a Shell

In news which will be of no surprise to those following my painting progress, I've gone back and reworked a painting of mine due to dissatisfaction with how it turned out. The painting in question is my blue glaucus painting, which I already reworked to add a shadow. Turns out I was never satisfied with the way the shadow looked, as it came out very gray and solid, so I decided to try redoing it with a thin black glaze today. I used some ivory black, which is the only black I have listed as anything less than “opaque” (it's “semi-opaque”). I think it worked out fairly well, you can judge for yourself below:

The old version…

…and the newly-blackened shadow.

This way the shadow looks a lot more distinct from the slug casting it, which is also quite silvery-gray. It'd probably have been good to make the shadow more out-of-focus from the start, but at this point I think I'm happy with it.

And what's the shell mentioned in the title, you may be asking? In computer terms, a shell is (to massively simplify, since I'm not even sure I understand it completely) essentially a program that you can use to send commands to the computer by typing them into a terminal window. These commands are pretty low-level, and are immensely powerful, to the point where you can easily save yourself hundreds or thousands of actions if you know what you're doing.

Shells are comparatively ancient in computer history terms, so there are a few common ones and several less commons variants floating around out there. The generally most common one is called Bash, which came out the year I was born in 1989 and stands for Bourne Again SHell (as it was written to be a free software replacement for the then-popular Bourne shell, which came out a decade earlier). This is by far the most common one encountered, as it comes as the default shell in most Linux distributions and macOS, and it's the one I've got the most experience with.

A few days ago I came across another shell called “xonsh” (pronounced “konsh” in a play on “conch shell;” perhaps the ‘x’ is meant to represent a Greek χ?). It had the intriguing premise of being written in Python, the language I've been using at work for quite a few years now, and being able to execute Python code directly in the shell while still retaining access to familiar Bash routines. In Bash you need to open the Python interpreter directly before being able to type and evaluate Python code, and you lose access to Bash's lower-level functions like being able to change directories or list their contents while doing so (technically Bash simply calls little executable programs for that, but you can't do so directly in the Python interpreter). Xonsh offers an alluring alternative where Python code and lower-level functions can be called and mixed freely, so I installed it on my desktop at home this weekend and intend to give it a try. I actually do run into situations in my PhD where I'd love to be able to execute some Python code at the terminal while using Bash, so it'll be interesting to see if this goes anywhere.

The caveat of any non-Bash shell, of course, is adoption; any other shell is not as popular, and therefore won't have as many resources about it online or people familiar with it to ask. I doubt I'll be ditching Bash anytime soon, but maybe I'll be surprised and find I can really replace it entirely. We'll see! A hui hou!

A Portrait of Maunakea in Paint

This past week I've finally finished another painting. And one I've been working on for quite a while! In fact, I started work on it all the way back to November 27 of last year, according to a photo I found:

It's not a great picture but it does show just how long this painting's been in production. Here's a better one of the canvas (which is also pretty ‘long’):

Here you can start to see what's going on. After my first painting of Mauna Loa and Maunakea, I had an idea for a rather different perspective of Maunakea: instead of a landscape, a portrait perspective, and one in a more extreme aspect ratio than normal. The idea was to have a vertical slice as if looking from the ocean's surface just off the Kohala coast, to the northeast.

This first attempt at painting the summit took up too much of the surface (although I think I did a pretty good job with the puʻu at the top), so I redid it:

Interestingly, the top third of this painting will survive from this point all the way to end  barely changed. (In fact, I never touched the sky again after initially painting it.) It'll go through some changes, but I ended up undoing most of them again so it still looks remarkably similar to this shot. You can see that I've vaguely sketched out some chalk lines lower down—I was attempting to sketch out a guide for painting, but it didn't work out too well this time around. I really had only a very rough idea what I wanted it to look like when I started.

I did a fair bit of work on the painting in December, which is when the past three photos come from; I added the ocean at the bottom, and some rocky sea cliffs in the middle. A lot of people found the ocean confusing at this stage, and I can't blame them: I wanted a perspective as if from the very surface of the ocean, being able to see above and below the surface simultaneously. It definitely didn't come through very well at this rough blocking-in stage, though. I also took a pretty long break from this painting after this; my family visited in January, and then I got distracted by my star series from February through April. In fact the next photo I have of it comes from May:

I must've done some work in the meantime, since I in this picture I've detailed the surface of the ocean with waves and spray, but also done some work on the forested slopes of Maunakea and reworked the cliffs. It's not very obvious (even in person), but I tried a new texture gel called “blended fibers” in the forest. It doesn't change it much visually, but it feels (tactually) almost like some sort of fabric or textile. I don't think it did much for the painting, but it was an interesting experiment. For the cliffs I used some course pumice gel with ground-up pumice in it, which came out much better; the cliffs have real rocky texture, which is both visible and tactile.

June was again busy getting things ready for the exhibition, so the next three photos come from the end of July:

Here there's a noticeable change—I decided somewhere along the way that I wanted to add some clouds, such as often shroud the shoulders of Maunakea when viewed from below on the windward sides of the island. I also, in a fortuitous moment, though I'd add a sea turtle (a creature with cultural significance in Hawaii) in the ocean. Which I'd also redone in the meantime with a gradient of five colors instead of three, starting with Prussian blue on the bottom, phthalo blue, phthalo turquoise, cobalt turquoise, and finally aqua green light at top (though it's also partially covered by some yellow representing light filtering through the water).

In this picture I'd just created a base for the turtle using flexible modeling paste, an amalgamation of ground-up marble dust in acrylic base, which hardens into a tough, marble-like substance which can be sanded, chiseled, or painted.

I also had an idea to add some snow on the summit; not a full snowfall, but what you see when it's been melting for some time and there are only isolated pockets left. I started with a very subtle expression of it with just a few small patches, but since I'd squeezed out more white paint which I didn't want to waste I ended up adding some more. This really didn't work out so well, but I fixed it later on.

Here I've tried to tweak the snow a bit by filling it in more, I've painted the turtle (which came out really well), and I've finally done something with the ravine in the center. The Kohala coast is full of ravines of various sizes due to all the erosion from all the rainfall, and I wanted to show one snaking its way up the mountain, but it never worked overly-well from this head-on perspective. At least it doesn't stick out as much after this.

Here's the close-up of that turtle which I posted back in August. I've gotten a lot of feedback that people really like what it adds to the picture, so I'm glad I added it!

In this picture, although it's not at all obvious, I've redone the ocean surface a bit. I was finally starting to catch on to things that weren't working in the picture, which I'd always felt suffered from a feeling of flatness. The summit is supposed to be dozens of miles further away than the foreground turtle, yet because of the way I'd applied details throughout the painting there was little sense of what was close and what was far away. I started with the ocean, by muting the details in the spray the further it receded from the viewer, so that the foreground spray remained large and detailed, but it got smaller and less detailed as it receded into the distance.

I also did something similar with the forested slopes of Maunakea, which had always felt quite flat and homogeneous, by adding some detail and lightening up the lower parts to make them seem more alive and close by.

I also painted over the clouds which had been bothering me for a while—they'd always seemed much too heavy, thick, and un-cloud-like. Interestingly, I didn't paint over them very thickly or uniformly, and ended up liking the result, which looked like some lighter patches of forest. They helped break up the monotony of the central third of the painting, which was what I was going for. You can also see my attempts at a white glaze over the summit and upper forest areas; I was trying to make it seem distant, but the glaze just didn't want to cooperate for me and pooled and left brush marks all over the place, so I painted over it later.

Apparently I forgot to take more pictures through September, because I went back and painted some new clouds after this. I also painted over the summit to remove the glaze, and most of the snow while I was at it; I realized that the snow had too much detail for something which was ostensibly in the background of the painting, so I removed all but a few small patches. Finally, I painted over the top of the forested area to remove the glaze from it, and while doing so decided to try out some green pigment I'd ordered from Culture Hustle a few months ago and hadn't gotten around to trying yet. This made a very pleasant light green, and since I'd mixed up a bunch, I started painting it around on the forest. Eventually I realized that it was exactly what I'd needed (some asymmetry and breaking up of the monotone color), and with that I realized that the painting was done. And here's the finished result!

“Portrait of Maunakea,” acrylic on canvas, 16×40 inches.

I call it “Portrait of Maunakea,” since as mentioned I wanted to go with a vertical slice portrait rather than a horizontal landscape. You can't really see it in this photo, but I added some air bubbles coming from the turtle, which I made of individual tiny glass beads. I also used some in the spray in the foreground to make it light and airy.

All in all, I'm quite happy with how it came out, though it was a long process during which I wasn't always sure I'd be able to bring it up to what I was expecting. By surface area I don't think it's the largest painting I've done, but it's still fairly large and striking. (Especially with the more-extreme-than-usual aspect ratio.)
Edit 10/28/19: Turns out this is the second largest painting I've done, by surface area: my first Mauna Loa/Maunakea picture was 80×80 cm, or 992 square inches. My largest star was 60×60 cm, or 558 square inches. This one is 16×40 inches, or 640 square inches, making it the second largest. The aspect ratio definitely makes it harder to estimate mentally!

I think I learned a lot about composition and detail doing this painting. The original composition was, quite frankly, terrible, full of horizontal lines breaking the painting in nearly even thirds, with detail all over in such a way as to obscure what the foreground and background were supposed to be. It's still not perfect, but it's definitely a lot better now. Hopefully I can put this knowledge to use in future paintings.

And what's next on the horizon? Well, I've finally started serious work on another large astronomical painting which I originally painted a black canvas for back in February. I'm thinking of doing a binary black hole, and I've been filming my progress along the way in hopes that I can make a time-lapse video when I'm done. No idea how (or if) that'll work out, or when, but we'll see! I also started some smaller projects to work on on the side. A hui hou!