Venus: Birthday #52

Today I have my 52nd birthday on Venus! Well, this Earth day. Days on Venus are a lot longer due to its slow rotation, and then when I looked it up I had to wrap my head around the difference between a sidereal day and a solar day again. On Earth, with its fast rotation, the difference between the two is only about 4 minutes. On Venus, with its slow retrograde rotation, the difference is about 126 Earth days.

Given that we generally mean solar day (the time between when the Sun reaches its highest point in the sky) rather than sidereal day (the time when a planet makes a full rotation with respect to the background stars) here on Earth, I'll do the same for Venus, which has a solar day of 116.75 Earth days. By that metric, it's been my birth“day” for almost two months (~58 days, so since mid-March) and will continue to be until early July. Which is pretty cool I suppose!

Anyway, continuing on with my in-progress painting, I'd left it with the beginnings of a bark texture. As mentioned, I didn't follow the color of my tree model, and that's because this is supposed to be a redwood tree. And on that redwood tree will be a majestic banana slug. I somewhat dislike giving away the final vision this early on, but as I started painting it in I can't show off more photos without revealing it. Nothing for it but let you all in on the process, I suppose!

Here, the big change from last time is actually not the beginnings of the slug I've started painting in, but the extra detail in the bark. I went over it again with a few colors, including gray. This turned out to be a much more important color than I'd anticipated, at it helped tone down the colors a bit and make them feel a bit more muted and natural, while making the saturated colors pop more.

Of course, the rough sketch of the slug is pretty eye-catching. I used some bismuth yellow to fill in an underlayer, and it turned out pretty fluorescent. A bit too fluorescent, so I painted it over with…

…this. I was attempting to do some shading from a photo, but A) I'm bad at shading, and B) it didn't exactly fit with the shadows from the bark. Almost every part of the slug here except for the outer fringe of its foot will be covered over…in the next post! Yes, I'll leave it here, and do some more work on it over the weekend. (Also, you might be able to see that I replaced the light bulb in my room with a brighter one in between the two photos.) Anyway, see you for my next birthday! A hui hou!