Psyche’s Wings
Therese Manesia Cook
March 5th, 2025
Major: Physics
Genre/Medium: Digital Art (Procreate)
About the work:
Continuing on the theme of illustrating scale, my second painting “Psyche’s Wings” uses an imaginary scene on Earth to convey the size of the Psyche spacecraft and its extensive wingspan. It was my first time painting something this large, so it was a challenge and a learning experience for me!
I started out small–when brainstorming this idea with tiny doodles on paper, I knew that I wanted to include characters in the scene to give viewers a relatable sense of scale and emotion. I imagined a character standing beneath the spacecraft, with her arms outstretched to mimic the great stretch of Psyche’s solar panels. Perhaps her friend could be with her, looking up in awe.
Once I had the gist of what I wanted to make, I used VR (Tiltbrush on Quest) to block out the composition with very simple stick figures. This allowed me to easily adjust the placement/posing of the characters and spacecraft, then snap test “photos” of them using the in-app camera, all with real perspective in 3D. I was looking for something striking, and once I found a view I liked, I drew it out more carefully on a large canvas in Photoshop. At this stage, I referenced the available engineering 3D model of Psyche as well as cleanroom photos from NASA’s online archive while drawing the spacecraft.
When it came time to paint, I felt stumped on choosing the character’s surroundings. I ended up going with something fantastical. A common comparison for the size of the spacecraft, which measures ~81 feet across, is a singles tennis court, so I turned my characters into tennis players! As a fun fact, Psyche’s solar panels cannot be deployed like this on Earth without special equipment to help suspend them, as they are too heavy to support their weight under gravity… But with a little imagination, it works just fine.
The coloring and paint work for this piece was done in Procreate. Perspective-wise, I didn’t want the illustration to look exactly like a 3D render, or feel too stiff. So while drawing this, I decided to push all the lines and curves everywhere to convey a feeling of forward and uplifting motion. To complement the wings motif, I included a flock of birds flying with Psyche overhead. I also chose a sunny color scheme that was very different from the stark greyscale of my first piece, but tried to stay consistent by using the sweeping arcs and the composition to show the excitement of the mission!
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