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Creating Space Art

Like any other form of artistic creation, Space Art is about creating a work of art that elicits a response from a viewer, only the topic of the creation is space. My personal method of creating art is two dimensional visual imagery, more commonly called “painting.” As discussed in the last posting, there are several sub-genres of Space Art and my preferences lie in creating images that are Descriptive Realism or Cosmic Expressionism. In this article I will describe the methods of how I and many other members of the IAAA go about creating a Space Art work of Descriptive Realism. Members of the IAAA have a listserver in which we discuss numerous topics about art and space, from tidbits on sales to advice on images. Recently there was a discussion on Jupiter’s moon Io and the volcanoes there which made me want to paint a view on the surface of one of those spectacular eruptions. The idea in Descriptive Realism is to create an image as scientifically accurate as possible, so my first step was to “hit the books” and do some research. I had an idea of what I wanted to depict, a view from inside an active caldera with the vast umbrella of an eruption overhead, something showing a view from underneath one of the images captured by the various probes that have flown by Io. Credit: NASA/JPL The first data to look up was where the active volcanoes were on the surface of Io. I found this in several books on... Read More..