Sketch 4

This sketch escalated quickly! I have been toying around with the idea of pixel art. I love the simple aesthetic. I was drawing the other day and thought how pixel art might be a fun way to represent the sun and planets in our solar system. The blurred, fractured surfaces of my sketches reminded me of looking at the stars through an old telescope I had as a child. While drawing the planets, I got to thinking about traveling to each one and the vast open space that is space. This led me to do a little research on the distance between each planet. I found this fun calculator. The lengths are insane and difficult to wrap my head around to make it more manageable; I decided to make a “short” film of traveling through space. I calculated out 100,000 miles for every second of time. When it was all said and done, I have an 8 + hour-long piece. I’m still shocked at the magnitude of the solar system, but this sketch helped me wrap my head around the time it would take to explore it. Below are the pixel art sketches if you don’t have 8 hours to watch the film. 

 

pixel art of a planet

Sun

pixel art of a planet

Mercury

pixel art of a planet

Venus

pixel art of a planet

Earth

pixel art of a planet

Mars

pixel art of a planet

Jupiter

pixel art of a planet

Saturn

pixel art of a planet

Uranus

pixel art of a planet

Neptune

 

First Sketch

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the idea of time these past couple of weeks, but the topic is so complex that my mind wonders in multiple directions, and I can’t seem to focus on one particular aspect. So I thought it would be interesting to explore this confusion in my first sketch. I studied something that takes seconds to complete and something that takes billions of years.

Sketch 1- food coloring dripped into warm water and photographed at three frames a second for 40 seconds. 

Sketch 1A – P5JS sketch of a solar system spiraling; the background is a single frame from sketch 1. When I zoomed in to the individual frames, it reminded me of the milky way, which led me here.