Deviation Actions
Description
Prismacolor pencils, metallic paint, and acrylic paint on black, 20X30 inch illustration board.
Made for a visual arts summer assignment: Make a political statement.
My "statement" is for increasing funding to the space programs. My concept, as illustrated, is a portrait of myself sitting on a park swing and going towards the NGC 4258 (also known as M106) spiral galaxy.
Without your caption I would have never identified galaxy, porch swing or politics connected with this drawing, for the nature of the luminous matter the guy beholds isn’t too obvious. I take molecular clouds inspired by Hubble views of our own Milky Way; in peculiar “finger” shapes created when stellar winds erode the outer layers of such clouds. The guy also seems hardly sure of what he’s gaping at, and he wears the kind of shirt medical techs usually put on, except the sleeves of cyan in that diagnostic cut don’t match the shirt trunk’s color as they do in hospitals.
I favor maintenance or hike of NASA budgets as well, having benefited from the wads of text and imagery its missions have generated over the years. No one had seen the surfaces of Venus or Mars in my childhood; Jupiter looked like a fuzzy billiard ball on steroids in Earthbound telescopes. Now we’ve gone by Pluto to discover its lovely “heart.” NASA remote sensing is crucial to understanding the manmade climate change affecting the green hills of Earth.
But if M106 should grow that big afront my eyes, I’ll pack up and go to bed. This 9th magnitude target doesn’t show much in binoculars. It’s hard to pick out because of the many other starlike objects and nebulae in the field; about halfway between Phecda and Cor Caroli serves as rough guide to location. Ursa Major’s M81 at mag 6.9 offers binocs more rewards in my opinion, evidencing almost a hint of spiral arms, though a 6- or 8-inch scope is needed to see these clearly.