Sketching crater Fracastorius

[Nightjar]

Another sketch made on 18th October. I started with crater Fracastorius with its crater walls in brilliant sunshine. I couldn't resist adding Piccolomini and then working outwards to include Catharina, Cyrillus and Theophilus.Wish I'd made it bigger - the original is only 10 cm square and right on the edge of the paper.

I had some fun in Photoshop and applied a filter called Artisitic -> smudge stick. That was fun, it's turned all artistic and smudgy. Anyone else tried that with a sketch ?

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[part timer]

Those are B****y brilliant!!!!!!

Well done!!

[lunator]

NJ

Excellent sketches

Cheers

Ian

[Talitha]

Another very nice rendering NJ, thank you. The second version may be more 'artistic' but I prefer the unretouched sketch. It retains the details and has more personality.. gives me a better feeling of having shared the eyepiece with you.

[stefski]

Great sketches Nightjar . I think I agree with Carol, I like the first one more!

Stef

[Dave Smith]

That is fantastic. I wish I had such skill and patience. I also prefer the original.

Dave

[PhillyDee]

Wow. I cant even draw a convincing outline of a smiley face. I really wish I had those skills.

[redglare]

I really like these

cheers

Ray

[Sam]

These are really great sketches, well done.

[Andrew*]

What a fantastic sketch, NJ. How long did it take you? Also, what magnification/eyepiece did you use?

1st one for me.

I hope you don't mind, but I had a play and I think increasing the contrast and desaturating it improves it a great deal by bringing out more detail and making it look more realistic - what do you think?

(click to enlarge)

Andrew

[saturn5]

Well from an artistic point of view i think you've made it worse.Its way to dark,the smaller craters look like potholes with no detail whatsoever. :nono:

If you want more detail and realism just look at a photo,this is after all a drawing which is usually someones interpretation of what they see and not

ment to be a photgraphic replica,having said that,this drawing is as near as you will probably get to "lunar realism",quite superb.....as it was...imho.

[Andrew*]

Fair enough.

My monitor might be showing it different from yours though. Personally I find the original too light to see most of the detail that's hiding in there...

Andrew

[Andrew*]

NJ, I do apologise if I offended you by fiddling with your sketch.

Personally, I was dumbfounded by the extraordinary amount of detail in it when I darkened it, which before was all but invisible to me. Maybe it's a difference in our monitor's settings.

And well done for winning POW with this - well deserved.

Andrew

[Nightjar]

Thanks Andrew,

To answer your earlier question - this sketch , if I remember correctly, took about 2 hours. I used a binoviewer for the first time and found it quite comfortable. The eyepieces gave a mag of about 200 X.

I don't mind in the slightest that you experimented with the sketch. In fact the extra contrast shows up the crater rims much better, although the whole thing is much darker than what I saw through the eyepiece. Like you, I'm just starting out with sketching and finding it's great fun to experiment with a bit of image processing.

Imagine spending 2 hours on your sketch, then deciding it's too light and drawing over the original to make it darker .... then finding you preferred it as it was.

Thanks for the congrats too. Still gobsmacked.

NJ