First post! How I paint nebulae and use reference photos

Hello friends! I want to use this blog page to share a little more about my process, any news I have, ideas for future projects, sources of inspiration, etc. Hopefully you find it interesting.

(This is a post that originally appeared on my Patreon page, which I've stopped using for the moment)

For my first post, I wanted to share a little bit about my process and how I go about painting space and the nebulae that appear in almost all of my paintings. I never paint specific celestial bodies—copying a photograph exactly isn’t really something that interests me, and I prefer to paint imaginary planets, nebulae etc. The universe is so vast and unknown that it’s likely that objects such as those that appear in my artwork really do exist somewhere! Though I don’t specifically paint Mars or Saturn or any other familiar planets or space objects, I do work from reference photos as inspiration and as a way to make my celestial bodies and nebulae look more realistic. I often look at several different reference photos when painting one nebula and combine varied aspects of those photos. As an example, here are two paintings alongside the reference photos that I used as inspiration for the nebulae.  

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