Well hello again.
Recovering from the post-college brain emptiness is a slow process so far, but I've managed to rally together to paint two pieces in as many nights - so it's time to share!
(Be sure to open these up to see them at full res!)
The first one here has a bit more of the creativity I've been looking for lately. This started as more of a doodle than anything but eventually became a more involved visualization of the Rosa system as a whole. The scales are not accurate of course, and I've talked plenty about the order of the worlds, but it was fun to properly depict the whole system in an artistic but structured way, like you might find on a NASA webpage or in the kind of books I read as a kid.
Obviously we have Rosa, the parent star, and her three little worlds. Today, we use a default naming scheme for exoplanets in which the star is considered object "a," and its worlds (in order of discovery, or just distance) are named starting from "b." Exoplanet enthusiasts from a particular Discord server will be happy to note that I've amended my embarrassing 3AM mistake of starting with "a."
As mentioned many a time on this blog, this is a pretty compact system, with a pretty small star - Rosa is only about the size of Jupiter (but considerably more massive), and her children, each smaller than Earth, orbit much closer than Mercury does to our own Sun. They're probably locked in some kind of resonance that makes their orbits stable over billions of years. I considered adding a greenish disk to represent Rosa's habitable zone, as I've seen in other representations, but since all three worlds are settled I figured that might be a bit redundant.
I haven't talked about the Outer Disk much on this blog, mainly because it's remained a nebulous concept in my head for some time. The Outer Disk is a population of small, mostly icy bodies lying out beyond Orus (Rosa d, the most distant planet). Its existence makes sense to me in a cosmological way, but I think it may be quite depleted by the time of the story. Long before our narrative begins, humans in the system harvested the majority of these objects in their conquest of the stars. With their disappearance, the fate of this material is unknown to the reborn civilization. As the people of the Rosa system began to reconnect and return to the skies, they turned to the remnants of this disk for raw materials once again. Almost all remaining mass in the Outer Disk was eventually deconstructed in support of infrastructure, including massive orbital foundries in orbit of Orus, vast fuelling depots, and the grand interworld castles that cycle amongst the planets. To this day, there may in fact be some very traditional space settlements (small pressurized habitats! The novelty!) scattered amongst the debris out here, and this could even figure prominently in the story.... I'll have to noodle about that one.
In any case I had an interesting time making that disk look right. I used the more granular tool with bigger particles to paint a disk, and spent a lot of time trying to shade it convincingly to be orbiting the central light source. I experimented with some radial spoke shadows but couldn't get them to my liking. When I finally added the finer cloud as an afterthought, it actually did a lot to sell the overall effect, so I guess that's a nice win.
The painted background was fun to do, with its sweeping brushstrokes and varying hues. The glow effect was a neat little innovation for me - I started with just a basic airbrush glow, then used a brush with no paint to sort of smear it into visible strokes while maintaining its transparency. It feels a little more organic and less sterile, which I'm always a fan of.
On to the next one!
This was tonight's work, and I tried to bring over the same energy as before. Rosa is rendered in the same way, and I used similar techniques for the (much subtler) background and the painted glowy bits. The approach to painting the planet was less involved than in a previous lineup I did - fewer layers, and more emphasis on just overall vibes for this one.
Here we have Orus, an icy ocean world on the fringe of habitability. Its distance from Rosa and slow rotation period result in extreme day/night variability, in effect more like short seasons than days. Orus' population runs on an irid'An-based schedule, with recurring "days" just 15 or so hours long, and Orus' seasonal cycle takes around 24 of these days to repeat. The global ocean freezes over during the dark Vigil, and warmth when Rosa is overhead is still fairly minimal. The world never seems to escape its biting winds and terminally capricious overcast skies.
In the distance, closer to Rosa, we have pr'Sefone (top left) and irid'An. The former generally appears to be a tidally locked desert world from afar; only close inspection reveals the temperate band of settled land lining its terminator. The lush irid'An practically glows with brilliantly reflected Roselight, a result of its own, significantly more pleasant world ocean.
Overall this piece definitely feels like an improvement over the previous single-planet highlight I made of pr'Sefone. I'm enjoying using these warmer, more saturated hues, and some more creative techniques to shy away from photorealism. Both of these pieces feel more inspired and alive than older ones I've done, even if they're a bit less intricate. I like this style a lot and will be hoping to develop it further in due time.
That's all for now - one of these days I've got to get to sleep at a reasonable hour....
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