SciFi and Fantasy Art: Mercury

Beautiful! I love the composition! (Man, I must love that word [composition].) LOL!

Fantastic--these amoeboids must be huge!!
[btw: Mercury and mercurial ]
I love the coloring of the sun
Very good for mousework, and good luck on getting the tablet (I'm after one myself)!

Shelz Keast replies: "Thanks, I think I like spending needless effort on details. I like getting wraped up in things or doing it the hard way. I got a tablet less than a week upon completing this peice."

I like this painting, and it is a nice idea, but Mercury's sun side is a mass of volcanic activity, while the dark side is almost as cold as deep space, this means that there is only the polar reagions that would be astable enough for any life form.
Also that would mean that in this view of the surface there would be signs of volcanos erupting and huge lava seas and lakes.

I read the book that this picture is based on, and I am almost sure that the author took that into account?

The sun looks beautiful and radiant in your painting, but I can see the digital signs, I think that if your computer can take it? You need to work on a larger canvas. 2400x3300 at 300dpi will give you a printout image measuring 8x11 inches, and it is also a good size to work on. If you have the ability to burn info to disc, I suggest that you also burn your large images onto a disc at very regular intervals if only for safeties sake.


One more thing, what is the large dark dumbell like shape? It's been a while since I read that book, so I don't recall everything from it?

Shelz Keast replies: "Wow thanks. Good, a list of things to improve on.Glad you liked the sun.I didn't know that Mercury had any active volcanoes. So there's somthing for me to look up.What book? I didn't base this on any book that I remeber. It looks digitaly done as, of course it is, but also because it was only my third attempt at a digital peice and I'm still getting used to using the program (Deep Paint). It would be nice to work at higher resoloutions but my computor can't handle it too well, so I make do with low res pics. (Also I tend to forget to zoom in to do details so the end result probably wouldn't look too diferent any way).The giant dumbell thing is supposed to be the Voyager 3 mother craft. Though it's very loosely based on the '2001-a space odyssey' space ship. Space craft are definitly not one of my strong points. "

The ship in 2001 is called the "Discovery." If you played around with the dumbell shape a little more and got rid of the line between the two round shapes, you'd have a set of nice looking sunspots. I see you have a few fainter ones, so you depiction of the sun is quite accurate.

Shelz Keast replies: "This one is old! I think it must have been the first in my series on the solar system (that places it about April 2006). So riddled with errors. There's another reason why the central bit of the ship should be removed, the glare from the sun would overwhelm it. Thanks for saying I've drawn the sun well."