A Pair of Rosa System Paintings

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....

Kent-Boreus KB404

Kent-Boreus is an interworld shipping company in Roselight. Not one of the more luxurious providers, KB is generally more cargo-oriented, with its few passenger routes having longer transit times and more spartan accommodations than their competitors. Nevertheless, they find their niche in high-volume cargo transportation between Rosa's Children, shuttling heavy payloads between growing worlds.

Their flagship vehicle is the KB404 hauler, the classic midsize cargo vehicle of the fleet. Similar in form to standard castle tenders, the KB404 is nevertheless much larger. Traditionally air-launched from exceedingly large rigid airships, the ubiquitous KB404 was one of the first to be adapted to use with the Orus Skywheel. Significant structural reinforcement has taken a bite out of its payload margin, but the reduction in fuel mass more than accounts for the extra material. Over time, many have been refit with smaller propellant tanks to accommodate greater cargo volume.

The KB404 flight profile begins with either a propulsive ascent from an aerial launch platform, or a momentum exchange from the Orus Skywheel. Either case sends the vehicle on a ballistic interworld trajectory, on the order of 5 to 10 days for most routes. Small course corrections and traffic avoidance maneuvers are made as necessary while the crew and cargo coast in microgravity towards their destination. Upon arrival, four actuated body flaps guide the vehicle along its simple, high-drag entry and descent profile. Below around 5 kilometers, the aerostat envelope is deployed by a series of pyrotechnics and rapidly inflated with lifting gas from a decomposition reaction. Once in stable drift, the hauler is retrieved by aerial tugs and refit for its next flight.

Though nominally crewed by up to eight flight officers, the pool of qualified pilots for Skywheel flights is much smaller. Smaller crews find themselves living in greater luxury, in exchange for extremely strenuous g-loading during launch.

Roselight would acquire an aging KB404 shortly before the Drenna Statute and ASMC's de facto implementation of martial law on Orus. This vehicle would be instrumental to the survival of Roselight's revolution in the following months, allowing a small group of insurgents to penetrate the transportation blockade en route to irid'An.

And now for a bonus image of Noira in the observation deck...

I also recently painted this scene of a similar vehicle departing irid'An, with Orus looming in the background. While this smaller craft is likely a ship tender, it still provides a decent concept of what the KB404 might look like in flight.

IM ALIVE

Oh god it has been many months since my last post oh jeez.

This unfortunate hiatus was generally caused by my final semester of undergrad forcibly extruding every last driplet of creativity out of my withered corporeal form like a 40-ton steel rolling pin atop the world's wimpiest tube of toothpaste.

However I am happy to report that I survived the ordeal and even managed to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering. So that's pretty cool.

With any luck I will be posting more frequently again. I don't have much in the way of summer obligations; I did apply for an M.S. program for the Fall, but it's looking to be somewhat less of a godawful nightmare than my undergrad, so I'll do my best to keep the momentum.

I've definitely had ideas bouncing around in my head lately, so I'll try and hit a consistent cadence of getting some of these out! Time and the blog archive will tell whether I succeed.

Sketch: Tempest

Marion’s gaze moved sluggishly across the paper, weighed on by the first signs of fatigue. He sighed, resting his head with a hand on his temple. Just three nights into Vigil and the low-light strain was already impeding his productivity; not long ago he might have worked straight through the season, with only the biting wind outdoors to remind him of the long dark. The corrective eyeglasses he’d so reluctantly incorporated into his workflow seemed less a crutch and more an ankleweight, his dependence growing by the day. He loathed the thought of those wires permanently affixed to his face, like retrofitting machinery past its service lifetime. Raising his head again, he moved to adjust his electric desk lamp. Defeat.

Relaxing his eyes, he returned to the document at hand. Figures leapt off the page in the warm light, documenting the assembly process for the rockbreakers’ new end effector. The powder-driven chisel was proving difficult to reinforce against fatigue; this latest revision in the design would hold up well, but introduced significantly more complexity for the crews meant to deploy it in situ. Even he would have lost track of the version number, were it not printed in block letters in the corner of the page. He knew, of course, that all this iteration was necessary, critical; still, he’d be glad to see the final revision shipped.

As he compared an older version against his present charge, the secondary articulation point caught his attention. That joint had seen more significant improvement than any other part of the assembly. Only minor adjustments to the arrangement of these components had been made, but the result had almost totally resolved the risks associated with this joint. It was elegant work; the kind so characteristic of her.

That subtle weight had returned to his chest. Noira had been a truly remarkable asset on his team. She had taken his direction and magnified it, exceeding his expectations for any of his engineers, let alone a junior trainee. This was the quality of work that his division had needed to leap ahead of schedule; the entire program benefitted from a mechanic of her caliber. In return, it was clear that she was flourishing in this environment as well. He had seen such growth from her in such a short few months that nothing could have possibly tempered his expectations for her future.

He sighed again, sitting back from his work. The howling Orine winds scattered icy flurries across the window of his office. She had been impressionable, as she always was. Tanura was such a novelty to her. He had offered his best guidance, knowing the kinds of influences that lay beyond the company district, the cacophony of voices that could lead her naivety astray. It was just what he had been afraid of, with Noira so vulnerable after the accident. The last thing she needed were the insidious seeds of distrust; distrust in the company, and in him. He remembered her face vividly, tormented by fear, confusion…and betrayal.

As it had then, the memory pierced deeper than he cared to acknowledge. It hadn’t been the same helplessness he’d seen in the accident; there was another, more sinister component. All her anxieties had become twisted into a vicious anger, directed towards the company which had provided so much for her, had housed and fed her to a standard of living far beyond what he knew she’d left behind. An anger directed at himself, who had moved mountains to take her under his wing, to provide her with every ounce of instruction and mentorship he could, to help her blossom into the accomplished engineer he knew she could become. All of his efforts had been cast aside, burned down and replaced with this tangle of confused morals she had found in the rakish halls of Tanura.

The ice continued to fall, born from the depths of Vigil, coating every surface in its brittle sheen. Before him, the document lay still, bare. He felt his own deep-seated chagrin creeping in from the corners of the room.

Surely there was some way he might have acted differently. Perhaps he had been overly stern; she had felt stifled, it seemed, unable to meet him where he stood. His unwavering ethic had certainly incited this response before. Elias had been much the same. Marion’s commitment to his craft, the insatiable desire to improve, to push his own boundaries, had been unpalatable for his partner – former, he reminded himself. Time and again he had grappled with this snare, how the pursuit of his own fulfillment could nevertheless drive others away, as it had Elias, and Noira.

Marion closed his eyes, listening to the clattering of the tempest. He would complete no more work tonight. At length, he tucked the document into his case, standing blearily from his desk. At the touch of his finger, the electric lamp went out with a crackle.

Roselight merch!

 I don't expect that there's, like, lines of people waiting for this, but nevertheless I figured I'd make an announcement here:

I have a Redbubble shop open now! There's a few Roselight pieces available in a wide variety of products, as well as some art I've done for Proxima: A Human Exploration of Mars. If you really want Noira looking fierce on a throw pillow, or stickers of the kids, or a poster of the planets, or any number of other things - consider checking it out:

Link to Redbubble!

As an incentive, I just finished this poster that I am very proud of, which you can find on the shop: