Some updates on what I've been up to: working on Missions to Mars

I've been busy in reality lately. The winter wasn't as keenly felt in Nebraska as Texas, but I did do a lot of shoveling for it. I also rebuilt the solar power system in my van, but that's significant enough that it'll have to be the subject of its own post.

Besides that, I've been drawing my greatest work since Carta Caela, a map of Mars. I already put the title in the work, it's going to be "Missions to Mars: 1971-2021." We've been doing this successfully for fifty years, and I've compiled a lot of information about it that's never been in the same place before. I think I might try a showing for some of this work eventually. If I can get a couple companions to this piece done, as well as a zodiac star chart series i have planned, I just might hit up the contacts i have for one. (I don't believe in astrology, but people do, and this series would just provide scientific knowledge about the stars in a given constellation; these maps can unite believers and skeptics, an instance of the artist's class need to appeal to the broadest possible paying audience.)

I'm gonna throw proper scans of these schematics up on my Patreon post about it when I'm done, but these teasers are mostly here to let everyone in on my thought process as I work. Stellar and extraterrestrial cartography in general is such a new, poorly-understood, and counterintuitive science that I have to compile all my data for a given map beforehand, and then carry out the work. The research alone is a big chunk of the work. What makes what I do different than just a glorified infographic, though, is the compiling of all relevant data to a given place, not just to a given subject in an article. There are Wikipedia lists mentioning every mission to Mars separately, depending on whether they landed or orbited or flew by. There are NASA maps of the landing areas, and public and private computer-generated maps depicting topography and named features. There is not yet a map of all of that in one place, easily digestible to curious eyes. I hope to make such a map, and I hope it'll become iconic in the way that the earliest European maps of the Americas have become iconic.

Besides the research, a lot of the work for this one in particular has been updating and finalizing my style for colored pencil maps. Most of my maps (my terrestrial ones at least) are done in pen, with pencil sketching beforehand to give the pen an idea where to go. But my space maps, given that they're literally covering new subjects, and are meant to be remembered, need to be full color. That makes lettering very difficult, and I've experimented with different lettering styles and finally settled on one that works for these. In Carta Caela, I drew the letters normally in black and encased the letters in a whitish box that just wasn't saturated like most of the rest of my colored pencil work. But this time, letters surrounded by black have their surroundings drawn first, with the letters themselves the last thing to be drawn, their aqua green coloration seeming to glow as some of the coloring bleeds into the black. When the lettering is black, I draw the letters first and then just surround it with the nonwhite color, so long as it's bright enough. Not having done the topographic coloring of Mars yet, there are a couple colors that won't be bright enough for that, so I might resort to white lettering for those, or white-surrounded lettering.

The lettering for the title of the map is also something I put some thought into. There is an emergent font set in my head that I've developed for making my maps, I've noticed. But I don't want to just mechanically apply it to everything I do. The subject matter of this one gave me an opportunity (hey what's up enjoy that pun) to be playful. The swoops and swirls of early science fiction fonts, like the John Carter of Mars series, were my main point of departure from that emergent font set. The bar across the middle of the A is meant to evoke the launch of a rocket, the bluish-green wispiness the feel of the Star Wars or Star Trek logos, the slash across the zero that distinguishes it from the letter O meant to look like an orbital path around a planet. On the notes, you can see me playing around with font ideas until I could settle on one that felt natural for the setting.

Before I leave, I think I need to find a place in my van for my easel. No way in hell that it'd ever stand up for long in the Nevada wind, but it could easily do so inside my little tinyhouse. Art was never meant to be the one and only way to support my lifestyle out on the range, but certainly, every bit helps. Between extra crops and a little money from a Patreon and ad revenue and gallery showings, I might just be able to cobble enough together to keep building this collective.