Rocky Planet

Painted in watercolours on A5 coldpress 300gsm watercolour paper. This painting was created, live, in front of visitors at the Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition. I used a NASA image of Mars to form a couple of the craters, but then just went free form with the rest of the composition. I wanted to see if I could suggest an atmosphere around the planet, using a wet-on-wet technique and the result even surprised me. I had to wrap up the completion of the painting so wasn’t very subtle with the shadow around the bottom half of the planet – once it had dried I realised that the effect was texturally pleasing rather than distracting. After the painting had been mounted, bagged, and displayed as part of the growing exhibition of finished artwork throughout the event it gained quite a lot of interest, with numerous offers to purchase. This painting forms an historic body of work that will eventually be going on tour with the exhibit ‘Mars to Humans’ as part of the research into Raman Spectroscopy by the group InLightenUs.