Solar twins and Chinese calligraphy

I've just finished my latest painting, and I'm especially happy with how this one came out and excited to share it. Now, back in 2018 when I first started painting, I gave two of my advisors each a small painting (though I'm embarrassed at their quality now). I decided recently that I'd like to do so for the other two people on my advisory team, and it's one of these paintings which I've just finished.

My advisor Fan is from China, and is an expert on solar twins, so I decided I wanted to paint a scene of a binary pair of solar twins with a Milky-Way-like background of stars. I started working on it in early February, and after just a few sessions (maybe 2 hours in) it was already looking pretty good:

As I like to with my painted stars, the disks have some texture medium (I think synthetic resin sand) mixed in to give them some “pop” on the canvas. The stars are all hand-dappled—I didn't want to risk getting paint around my desk where I paint at home by spattering, although it occurs to me that I could've done it outdoors. Something to keep in mind for the future, I suppose.

Anyway, after a few sessions of individually painting background stars in an attempt to get that feeling of the innumerable stars of the Milky Way, I had a spur-of-the-moment idea that worked out really well: I took tiny drops of iridescent medium (which has tiny flakes of mica in it to make it sparkle), and spread it out as thinly as I could over the background. As you can see in the picture below, this came out looking phenomenal!

You can see some little star spots I painted on best in this photo.

(It also gave me inspiration for a completely different painting, but I'll get to that in due time.) For the name, in the spirit of my “Sonne Doppelgänger” painting for my fellow student from Germany, I wanted to call it “Solar Twins” in Chinese. I got a friend of mine from Hong Kong to help me with the translation, and used my best calligraphy to write it out in the traditional top-to-bottom, right-to-left orientation on the canvas:

“太陽孿生兒 (Solar Twins)”, 10×8 inches, acrylic on canvas.

Overall I'm extremely pleased with how this painting came out. This photo doesn't quite do it justice, but the shade of red I picked really sets off the yellow of the stars and the black of the background incredibly well. I also put a lot of work into those characters, and am pretty happy with how they came out. If you're curious, they literally translate to something like “extreme yang (sun) twice born child (twin),” which I thought was pretty neat. I'm planning on giving it to Fan this week, and can hardly wait to see his reaction. (Edit: He loved it!)

For being such a quick, simple painting I actually learned a few things from doing it which will doubtless come in handy in the future. Much like my—uh, fiery planet painting? I realized I never officially finished it and gave it a name*—I experimented with mixing other colors directly into the black background, in this case the star's extended yellow coronae. I realized later that this meant painting the stars (which should be in the background) on top of them, so I'll have to think more carefully about doing it in the future, but I think it looks pretty nice here. And I mentioned the iridescent medium thinly applied for the background Milky Way effect already. All in all a short and sweet painting (probably less than ten hours all told), and one I'm really happy with. I've got one more canvas of the same size (last of something like an 8- or 10-pack I bought all the way back in 2018) and one last advisor to gift, which will involve something other than stars for once. But that'll be for another post! A hui hou!

*Which I should do, since I finally brought it home from my desk last month.