Aurora Alienus I-III: Stretching My Skills

As I discussed in my piece about the Beautiful Monster series, the complimentary Aurora Alienus pieces also went on a bit of a journey from concept to finished piece. Only this one was all skill stretching.

I knew when I set out to make a series of aurora pieces that I needed to practice, you know, actually painting something resembling an aurora. Because of the neurographic line art connection, I thought I could play with aurora ribbons made from neurographic lines. I even practiced a bit on paper with my original technique idea...and promptly discovered a side effect of that technique that I did not like.

I tried a few other techniques and played with creating a more variegated elongated ribbon effect and a hazy cloud effect. I finally landed on something I could live with in the finished pieces, especially when I decided to call them alien auroras. This does compliment the beautiful monsters well as they are close to giant squid-type creatures but definitely in beastiary category all to themselves.

The backgrounds were the fun and easy parts of these pieces. To get a good night sky that has character, I first scraped paint across the canvas with a wedge. This creates chunky, non-uniform streaks and gashes of variegated color, sometimes layering, sometimes barely covering the canvas. Often, I like the effect of that technique as a background on its own, but the chaos of the scraped colors was going to be too distracting for the background of these pieces, as shown here:

Neat effect, sure, but it's not really giving night sky. To calm that chaos, I painted over with the same three colors with a loose blending technique. The original chaotic color chunks do give that night sky some texture and interest without actually distracting from the primary focus of the aurora. Then I sprinkled a few different diluted inks to create the stars, which can be seen here against that textured background in the upper right of the picture:

And then I started paint smooshing to create the haze of an aurora. I used the same colors as the Beautiful Monster bodies and tentacles but kept blotting the paint against the canvas so it didn't give the same scaly, veiny look. This was a lot of fun, but if I had had more time, I think I might have blended the colors a bit more for slightly more uniformity in the haze.

After that, I got to work with acrylic markers to lay down the neurographic-style aurora ribbons. I brushed each of these lines a bit with water to blur the lines some and stretch the colors a bit.

The markers themselves were the failure point of this technique originally. The idea was to blur the lines a lot by swiping up from each line when they had freshly been drawn. However, the nature of the markers meant that the full outline of the mark could still be seen, and the color was leached out of the center of the line.

It looked strange in a "mistake" way instead of an ethereal, abstract way.

So I drew the lines, let them dry, then drew over them and swiped at that new layer of color. I still had to go back over the lines again sometimes. This gave the aurora ribbons a much stronger edge and presence than I had originally planned, but it works better overall for the pieces.

I am very happy with how they compliment the Beautiful Monster series. And all of this time-constrained adapting was a definite boost to my skill set (both for my art and for my profession as an artist). However, I do want to refine my aurora skills more in the future and get them a bit closer to reality.