Painting Solar Twins (Quintuplets?)

Back in late February or early March, approximately 217 years ago before the lockdown started, I picked up a pack of five small artist's canvas boards. I didn't have a plan in mind for them at the time, but one of my fellow-students Christian, who's working on another aspect of the same problem for his PhD as I am, was having his first annual review soon, so we decided it would be fun if I painted all the panels to look like solar twin stars so he could put photos of them in his talk (as his research is focused on discovering new solar twins further away than the ones we know of now).

Solar twins, if you don't know, are simply stars that are very similar to our Sun, in temperature, mass, luminosity, etc.. They're the basis of my PhD project, which revolves around using solar twins to be able to get the first constraints on variation in the fine-structure constant from main-sequence stars. (I actually just made some plots representing the culmination of almost three years' of PhD work this past week, so perhaps I'll write some more about that when I have time; my final annual review, the Draft Thesis Review, is coming up on September 23 so I'm going to be insanely busy preparing for that the next few weeks.)

I quickly got the panels painted in time for them to be added to Christian's talk (see the picture below for what they looked like then), but I wasn't completely satisfied with them, and kept going back to play with them some more.

“Solar Quintuplets,” acrylic pentaptych on canvas, 10×10 cm.

I actually quite like the effect of these with the peaks of transparent yellow oxide, a color I really learned a lot about the nuances of while making these. I mixed it quite thinly with some transparent medium, giving it an almost honey-like color and consistency here. However, I felt the stars didn't quite have enough limb-darkening around the edges, so I decided to darken those ever so slightly. This, unfortunately, set me down a long trail of darkening the limbs too much, attempting to lighten the center by thin transparent glazes, overdoing it and lightening everything too much, etc., etc., until I've finally got them to something resembling what I imagined (though honestly, at this point I'm inclined to just accept that not every project works out and be done with them).

Anyway, here they are, taken outside in the full light of day, which almost doesn't work as well as taking them indoors with the flash on. Even the jet-blackness of Black 2.0 is overwhelmed by the Sun's light, making them look a bit washed out. They really do look better in person (and indoors), trust me! I do at least kind of like how the surface texture came out, though again it doesn't really display well here. Pretty much all my cool and fun gel mediums are sitting at my desk at Swinburne, so I had to get creative with the two jars of matte and gloss finish thick viscosity medium I had on hand to get that texture. 

As I said, I'm inclined to accept these as just not really working out and move on. They can't all be winners, and frankly I've had—what is to my mind—an almost surreal level of success in translating ideas from my head to canvas so far, so I'm fine with an occasional dud. I've discovered I don't particularly enjoy painting on these canvas panels, for whatever reason—I vastly prefer a stretched canvas or wooden surface, so I probably won't get these again. A good learning experience, I suppose. With that I'm down to the last piece of stretched canvas I have on had (which does have a picture in progress), so I'm really looking forward to the end of the lockdown (whenever that happens) and the opportunity to pick up some more of my paints and mediums and some more surfaces to paint on. There's a round wooden artist's board that's been sitting around at Swinburne since early this year that I can't wait to get back to working on; I've got a fun mixed-media idea that's been percolating in my head for most of a year now. Soon, hopefully! A hui hou!