Re-entry

Artwork.

Completed 2018-03-05. Available releases:

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An Apollo capsule re-enters Earth's atmosphere.

The capsule's velocity compresses the air in front of it. This heats the air adiabatically, causing it to flash into plasma and produce a shockwave. The shockwave traps some air behind it, providing a cooler buffer region that isn't as damaging to the capsule's heat shield. The shockwave also interrupts radio communications with the capsule.

Artistically, this marks the debut of some new techniques I learned in making it:

  • I already knew about layering pencils, but one limitation I've been having is that if the layers get too thick, then the surface gets all waxy and doesn't accept any more pigment. Well, it turns out it's mostly not a problem of having too much color, as that the surface of the paper gets rubbed smooth. If you just take a lighter touch, you can layer far more (and you'll have to, since lighter touches make for slower work).
  • Blending. I had tried this before with, like, my finger, but it was so suboptimal I didn't even realize it had potential. Instead, you need to use a tortillion (basically a stylus made out of paper fiber). This works far better, and produces a smooth tone, filling in the gaps of the paper. It also spreads out the colors, and this was frustrating especially on the clouds here, because I had to draw and blend the clouds multiple times to get a light-enough color.

Overall, I took some of the lessons learned from making the planetary shader for my solar system simulator and tried to apply them here. The day/night terminator has a reddish cast, and the edge of the planet is more luminous than you'd expect. There's a thin haze suggesting an atmosphere, and a blue-white cast to everything. It's not anywhere near what my shader does, but it's a recognizable effort. Hopefully I can optimize it in the future.

In real life, the picture looks better than the previous I've made. However, when scanning, the graininess issues plaguing the previous scans actually get worse, and also everything gets desaturated for some reason. I had to work pretty hard in photoshop to get it to look more like the original. The heat shield in particular is actually supposed to be white-hot at this point; I blame the scanner for not capturing the intensity correctly.

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