Jupiter

Yesterday was a strange day for me. The results of the election across the pond were disconcerting, as although I know little of the real issues surrounding each candidate, I can’t believe that having someone who just seems unkind and unhinged wielding that amount of power is healthy either for a country, or as a normalising influence on the world, having such a person as the head of the most powerful country on Earth.

Therefore, I was pleased to have a Wild Life Drawing session to attend online, where I could sink into the calm of making art for a couple of hours. The subject was Jupiter, with an astronomy expert joining us to answer questions, and some incredible images of our neighbourly gas giant to draw. Back when I did my Geosciences qualification with the OU, I used to find myself getting literally spaced out when studying the vastness of the cosmos, and it was nice to lose myself in the scale and science of astronomy.

I used my Leuchtturm sketchbook, and went in with watercolour, not my usual medium but I wanted to try and get a sense of the swirling mists:

I filled in the void behind with blue-black gouache.

Today I was still feeling out of sorts and distracted, so once I’d done my admin, I cut out a circle of 320gsm Khadi paper and got to work with inks. I used sepia and grey inks with a brush on wetted paper, and then added detail with fountain pens with the same inks, followed by a little white gouache for some of the smaller storms, known as “pearls”. I painted the back of the page of my sketchbook with the dark gouache, and stuck in my rendition of Jupiter once it was dry: