Project 10

A nomad (or rogue) is a wandering planet; a cosmic entity that was probably once in orbit around a star somewhere in the universe but was somehow dislodged and nudged out into space where it drifts, lifeless, and without direction until it nudges up against something else, if it ever does. This painting imagines one of these lost planets arriving here.

Using the same foreground shapes and palette, I’ve reduced the chaos of the scenes that follow in the series although they were painted and posted earlier. Call it a glitch in the time-space continuum. The media include watercolour pencil, tube acrylics and a blended wash of Naples yellow with titanium white Lascaux Aquacryl. The temptation would have been to use a brighter yellow with some inherent drama to it, but I was imagining this planet appearing in the early morning of a summer’s day where the colours are soft yet still energetic.

I pulled up the landscape into the sky with a rag, softening the horizon and making more of a mist over the low fields. There were several photos of this stage but I can save us all time by going straight to the last as each change was minuscule and barely discernible. An illustration, cropped below, shows some tiny lines running horizontally across the invader and gently stretched outwards with a brush at that Goldilocks point of being damp and not damp.

The video (standalone and for AR) is not an attention grabber due to its slow-moving subtlety.

Rogue planets at 2.13. I can’t vouch for accuracy of the science here, but there’s nothing I haven’t seen in documentaries made and voiced by credible sources.

4th February 2025. There is an actual asteroid coming our way with a 1.3% chance of hitting the Earth on December 22nd, 2032. Hardly an epic Santa event. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqx9dgpx98go. But the good news is that we could nudge it into a 0.00% chance of hitting us: “In the unlikely event YR4 were headed our way, one option would be to divert it by hitting it with a robotic spacecraft, as was successfully tested out with Nasa’s Dart mission in 2022. That changed the course of an asteroid that was not on a collision course with the Earth. Nasa’s Dart mission showed that we have the means to divert an asteroid, but only if we spot it early enough,” says Dr Massey”. And this is why we need space travel.

SCH 2024