The eighth skull!
Skull 08
I wanted to paint a space-skull (if you’ve seen some of my previous work, I’ve painted a few skulls-in-space before) that was a little different, using some of my favorite spacescape-colors. That is, colors that are more transparent so that you can put color on black canvas and it doesn’t look like there’s much color on it until you start blending in some white (or yellow, but I chose white for these). I like that when I paint like this, it’s almost like that magic-color black scratch paper I had as a kid (where you scratch the black part off to reveal colors underneath), because it looks so dark until you blend in lighter less transparent color. The transparent colors also allow some of the background “stars” to poke through so it looks like there are stars behind any object that is not heavily painted, which is what works so well for nebulae and galaxies. You get instant depth because you have background stars, the somewhat-transparent celestial object “in front of” those stars, and then stars in front of/in the nebulae can be added by hand. This is what makes spacescapes so much fun for me, and to add skulls to that looks really neat to me! 😀
Video
Music: “Pulsar” by Sergey Cheremisinov is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License.
Spooky Film: Today’s spooky film of the day is “Event Horizon,” which is also set in space! For my friends who are afraid of aliens (I have at least two friends who don’t mind spooky movies as long as they don’t have aliens), this one does not have aliens. It does have some gore, though (and at least one obvious reference to “Hellraiser” right before it gets extra gory), so if you can’t stand some gore, you won’t like this movie. It also has a scene with gallons of blood (likely a nod to “The Shining”)… actually, it’s interesting to try to spot the references to other spooky movies in this movie. I like that this movie almost seems like it could be a psychological horror – maybe it’s all in their heads – and then it seems almost like “Sphere” (the book actually spooked me as a kid; the film was ‘meh’) where the horrors in their head were coming to life… until it’s definitely obvious that it’s not either (well, it’s still a bit more like “Sphere”). I enjoy watching “Event Horizon” while I paint spacescapes, and so I’ve probably watched it at least twice already this year. I wouldn’t say it’s a “great” or “classic” but I think it’s an enjoyable spooky sci-fi horror movie.