This medium-sized vertical night sky painting was made using hand-mixed ultramarine blue and flecks of 23K gold leaf.
It is the first night sky I’ve painted using the vertical format, and I think the format really worked well here.
Below are a few detail and context photographs of the painting in the studio, along with a 4-minute video showing some of the process behind the 23K gold leaf stars. In the video, the white triangles are pieces of tape that mark spots where I’ve applied gold size to receive the leaf. The little spots of glue are hard to find once they are dry enough to gild, the tape makes this easier. The smaller brush helps ensure that all of the size has gold pressed into it, and the larger brush is used to clean off excess loose gold leaf.
