Across Psyche
- Year
- 2024-2025
- Artist
- Therese Manesia Cook
- University
- University of California, Los Angeles
- Major
- Physics
- Title
- Across Psyche
- Genre
- Digital
- Medium
- Procreate
- Photoshop
- Heavypaint
- Category
- digital still
- Current Location
- Digital Only
- Description
-
The piece “Across Psyche” is a set of three wide landscape illustrations of the asteroid Psyche’s surface, imagined from a perspective showing an expansive display of features. Overlayed above the illustrations are three sweeping arcs, which, upon closer inspection, trail behind the very tiny orbiting spacecraft Psyche. The inspiration for this piece was to convey the size of the asteroid. It is meant to give the viewer a sense of scale: the asteroid Psyche is not just any space rock–in comparison to the spacecraft it’s very big, measuring over a hundred miles across! And, it is bound to have interesting topology and features across this expanse of surface. As no one has seen the surface of the asteroid Psyche yet, the artist hoped to use dynamic shapes and curves as a way of expressing the excitement of the mission, which will discover many new sights across the asteroid.
To create this artwork, the artist used a combination of different drawing programs. A number of initial concept sketches were created in the Procreate app for iPad, three of which were chosen to paint in more detail. The art was then brought into Adobe Photoshop for subtle color/contrast adjustments. Additionally, the program Heavypaint was used to introduce subtle hue shifts that created some minor hue variations in the drawings. The artist wished to remain conservative with the colors to offer perhaps a more realistic view of what the metal asteroid might look like. To create this piece, the artist found it uniquely challenging to paint landscapes that did not have any familiar features, like atmospheric scattering (gradients in colors of the sky, or features that fade off in the distance) but tried to make the scenes look interesting with an abstract, painterly art style and contrast in the values and types of shapes used.
- Media
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Across Psyche
Part of Across Psyche