Birth and Dragons

Seeking inspiration for my 'painting day' - 

yes, Monday is my day a week set aside for painting, which of course means I spend half the day painting the other half walking the dog, fiddling around with paperwork, doing laundry and hoovering looking at Facebook and watching TV 

 - I came across the latest Hubble Telescope image of the birth of a star. It is a stunning image: /http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1144a/ 

and I did my best to recreate the feel of it using acrylic and pastel. I didn't try to be accurate with star positioning etc, I just wanted to get the sense of the brilliance of the star and the soft swirl of the dust particles. I was pretty pleased with the reults though I can't claim it as original as I could not have produced it without seeing the Hubble photo.

I then went on to try out another Nebulae image, it started life as a simple dust cloud which then started to look like a dancer but prettty soon became a dragon - I added a little more yellow and red into the space around the nebula and am happy with it. Dragon Nebula, of course.

In the first painting I masked out the stars then painted a blend of black, yellow, blue and red gradually smudging in white and opaque yellow then finally adding the white pastel halo around the stars and the highlights on the dust cloud. In the second one, I had already got a piece of watercolour paper that I had used up my palette contents on last week so masked out the orange and yellow stars, painted flat black over it, added some white and yellow smudges then used a mapping pen and white acrylic ink to mark in the other stars, again using pastel for the clouds and halos. The first technique worked better.