Art Tip #3

The lunar surface is largely a demonstration of 'steady state' saturation cratering, a situation emulated by Man principally on some World One battlefields and in small scale tests in laboratories. Newer craters disfigure older craters, and relative ages can be easily determined in cases where they overlap. There are many more small impacts than large ones. I recall Don Wilhelms, my supervisor at the U.S.G.S. during the Apollo era, saying there were roughly ten times more craters a tenth the size of any given crater assuming constant exposure over geologic time. This results in a kind of 'sandblasting' of the surface which softens the outlines of older craters, along with other factors. These kinds of things should be known to guide one's hand in the painting of such scenes. The portrayals of the shadows cast by bowl shaped landscape elements can be aided by making clay models as Chesley was known to do. Close-up lunar soil textures can be approximated by dropping small handfuls of powdered plaster into a deep tray of the stuff under a strong directional light in a dark room. When drawing an imaginary lunar scene from above I would generally paint in the small crescent shaped dark shadow areas first, working on larger such features, some more pronounced than others, until the larger contours 'beneath' the smaller detail were defined. Then I would go back and 'freshen up' the craters which were more recent, taking care not to make the 'rays' look too starbursty-contrived. This is in the instance when I am not trying to show an actual area on the Moon. Then the opposite is generally the case, first the gross than fine details go in as I am making a portrait of a specific site. Effort must be taken to convey the random nature of these events, as mentioned elsewhere. One can literally look into how the mind of an artist processes such things by seeing how they attempt to portray randomness. One of the last things I would do in such a painting is deliberately not look at it for a day or two and then look for spurious linier arrangements of craters and detail and erase them. It's almost a kind of Zen state to seek to dismiss one's instincts to impose patterns on the world of our senses. The general 'look' of the scenery is provided by reference to surface photos taken by robots and people, a luxury for those hoping to 'show it like it is' on other worlds. Someday, more varieties of Martian landscapes will be imaged by robot landers, giving more of a feel for the variety of scenery to see there.

Lunar South Pole
by Don Davis, FIAAA