Painting For Fun Update

I have been very busy in the past few months. Painting For Fun is/was a great deal of fun, but also a huge amount of work for me, and I'm learning as I go along. I am basically offering two painting sessions a month with about 8 people in each one, which requires me to prepare 16 projects per month! Wow!! I finally figured out how to print on the lightweight canvas in pads made by Fredrix and that has saved me a huge amount of time. However, my printer is very temperamental and the canvas folds over and jams the printer time and again. I am waiting for an order of canvas that is designed for inkjet printing. We shall see if that helps.

I have a website with all the current projects listed with samples of them so that people can check it out in advance. www.paintingforfun.info. There are all sorts of goodies there and more are coming soon...Flowers, Angels, Geometric Designs, Scenic America, Lighthouses, and so on.

Most of my friends are novice painters and require fairly simple images to paint, but a few of them are more advanced and the following project is one that I made for them. It is Spiral Galaxy M74 as seen by the Hubble Telescope and painted by me. I tried it twice and the first attempt is safely in the local landfill. It was horrible, as I used black canvas and that was so difficult and I couldn't find any reference points in the photograph of the Galaxy to focus on. In the end I turned the photo into a greyscale image and printed it on the canvas and painted on top of it. Even so, it was difficult for me as I kept losing my way, which I suppose is the whole point of being lost in space.

This is painted in acrylics with various glitter paint and glow-in-the dark glitter added here and there. I sprinkled the glitter on small glue dots to give it some interesting sparkle. Most of the white points were simply dots of white paint.

 

This is an image I shot with a huge ISO in my bathroom with the camera hand held which is why it is somewhat out of focus, but you can see the glow-in-the dark paint showing up in the middle of the spiral.

And for all you folks who love mathematics here is the diagram of the Golden Spiral superimposed on top of the Galaxy. Is it any surprise that it is correct mathematically? I am using PhiMatrix, a nifty program that allows you to figure out all kinds of things related to the Golden Mean. If you are so inclined you can find it by doing a Google search.