Mercury: Birthday #133

Finally, rounding out this month of birthdays, it's Mercury's turn! And wow, 133! Over twice as high as Venus. Getting three Mercury birthdays per Earth year really puts in perspective just how fast it goes around the Sun (every 87.97 Earth days). There's an option, when setting up the planetary birthdays calendar, to skip every so many Venus and Mercury birthdays, but I don't want that. Being 133 on Mercury doesn't make me older—or feel any older—than I am, and I want to see just how many birthdays I can rack up there.

Much like Venus, Mercury has a rotational period much longer than an Earth day. It also exists in a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance with the Sun. This fact in particular makes figuring out how long my birthday has actually been happening on Mercury…complicated. A solar day on Mercury is 176 Earth days—even longer than Venus' 116.75—so in theory my Mercury!birthday has been going since mid-March (coincidentally around the time my current Venus birthday started, though it will outlast that one by going till almost mid-August…just in time for Mercury to make another lap around the Sun on August 24th). The whole concept of a birthday really kind of breaks down on Mercury, since laps around the Sun are twice as common as sunrises, so I think I'll end this speculation here.

Instead, let's get back to slugs! Er, slug paintings. If you remember from last time, I'd decided to build up the slug with some flexible modeling paste. I've done just that in this next photo…

…though it's admittedly hard to see a difference from the previous photo. Just trust me when I say that I've built up the body a bit, and also closed the gap between the front and rear parts. It now feels much more like a real presence on the canvas.

I felt that the modeling paste buildup was complete, so I moved on to painting. You might wonder why I'd need to do any painting, since I've been mixing some yellow paint in the modeling paste as I go along, but there are two reasons for it. For one thing, the modeling paste is very, very, viscous. You can see in the photo above that it preserves individual brushstrokes in incredible detail. Each session working with it requires a lot of time very carefully flattening its surface, trying to keep the most egregious ridges down. But this is a slug, and should be more smooth-looking! (Though banana slugs do actually have some mild texture on their latter two-thirds, which I still need to figure out how to represent.)

The second reason has to do with reflections. When dry, modeling paste is quite a matte material, meaning it doesn't reflect light in concentrated spots; it has diffuse, rather than specular reflection. It's the opposite of glossy, which is more like how we expect a slug to look. So the purpose of painting the modeling paste is two-fold: to smooth out some of the texture caught in the paste, and to give it a more glossy reflection.

And here it is after the first coat of glossy paint. This light isn't the best illustration (especially because, in the previous photo, the still-wet modeling paste also shows some weak specular reflection), but you can kind of see how it looks smoother and more glossy. Most paints are somewhere between glossy and matte, and I've got some gloss gel and some matte gel that can be added to tip the balance one way or the other. I used matte gel in the paint for the bark background, which should make the contrast with the glossy slug all the more obvious.

It's definitely coming along quite well and looking mighty nice, but I'm not done yet! I still have a few last little touches in mind, so there'll be (at least) one more post finishing up this journey. I also  unexpectedly* managed to get a video of the total lunar eclipse last night, so expect that soon as well. A hui hou!

*It'd been all or partly cloudy from a big weather front all day so I really didn't have much hope for the evening, but then it cleared up about an hour before the umbral portion of the eclipse began.