On Saturday, July 20th, 2019, NASA celebrates the Apollo missions’ 50th anniversary. To celebrate, they held an art contest, which I entered in. The contest required me to use images taken on the Apollo missions.
To start this painting, I first decided what I wanted it to be. I decided I wanted it to be of a person because I enjoy drawing people the most. I looked through the NASA website to find inspiration and after finding an image of an astronaut floating in front of Earth, I decided I would use that as a base. As I sketched the basic layout of the painting, I came up with my plan: the painting would be a portrait of Neil Armstrong in a spacesuit with a dark background and the reflection of the moon on the helmet.
As I began painting, I set out the basic colors in blocks across the painting. I left white, grey, and blue blocks along the spacesuit, and peach and brown blocks along Neil’s face. These sections of color helped me to set up the basics of the highlights and shadows of the painting. This method is shown in the image above, mostly on the left side.
For the face, I used peach for the midtones, brown and black for the shadows, and a mix of peach and white for the highlights. I used a mixture of red and peach for the lighter shadows and to add a bit of blush. After laying out the basic color setup, I added details to the eyes, nose, and mouth. The picture shown above is an in-process picture once I finished the face and had the basic setup for the suit.
As I continued to add details to the suit, I decided to use gold on the left as highlights and silver on the right as midtones to help add to the otherworldly effect of the painting. I also added glitter in the brighter areas: the lights on each side of the helmet, the brightest parts of the left side, and the eyes.
Once I finished the suit and face, I worked on the background. After painting it all black, I used the technique shown in the video above to create the stars. I covered up the main part of the painting with paper towels and then, using a mixture of water and white paint, used my finger to flick the paint onto the paper. I also used a white pen to add more stars. I added stars in the background and on the inside of the helmet.
When it came to the reflection, I honestly had no clue what I was doing. I ended up creating a shadow over the face on the left side and painting the moon over this shadow.