Thursday, July 15, 2010

Gas Garden


Sometimes I think the most fun part of making these nebula pictures was thinking up the title. This one is called "Gas Garden." There isn't a garden in space, at least that we know about, but I think of a cloudy leafy place full of flowers made of glowing gas or protostars. OK, gardens should be green, not blue, but when I fooled with this picture in Photoshop trying to make it green, it came out looking queasy and just not good. Since I am around vegetables and fruit so much in my work life, I would put tomatoes and pears into my surrealistic space garden, should I paint one now, which I won't, since I am busy turning out a fruitless experimental piece which may lose me the few readers I have for this skwushy little blog. Stay tuned.

"Gas Garden" is acrylic on illustration board, 10" x 7", November 1991.

3 comments:

Brad said...

This looks like it could be a background painting for an old Disney space cartoon. And please understand I mean that as a high compliment. Some of the Disney background artists were geniuses.

Tristan Alexander said...

It looks like a gragon head to me with the glowing eye!

Pyracantha said...

Thanks, Brad and Tristan...I agree about those old Disney cel artists. To think of how many of those cels were just thrown away! Now it's a lost art with the domination of digital animation.

I've thought maybe I should use some of these old astronomicals as backgrounds for a figure study or spaceship, using the layering magic of Photoshop.

As for dragons, Tristan, maybe I should try to do one. I've had the same problems with dragons as I've had with human figures. No movement, no lighting, and bad anatomy.