This is a charcoal study that I did in preperation for a painting I'm working on. I've had an interest in exoplanets since I was young, and ever since I started art school I wanted to create a picture like this. I wanted to address the problem of how someone would light a scene on a planet when there was more than one star in the star system and still give it the sensability of a traditional landscape painting. I decided to set my planet in a trinary star system like the star system next door to ours (the Alpha Centauri system.) The plan is to have one star as big as ( or larger) than our sun providing the main light "off screen" and two, dim red dwarfs in the actual composition also providing a limited amount of light. I've also done a few color compositions.
