Current Student Collaborations Participants
View a list of the students, faculty, staff, and mentors currently involved in Psyche Student Collaborations.
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Polaroid Portraits: Psyche’s Cosmic Captures
Cindy Furukawa
April 29th, 2024
Major: Mechanical Engineering
Genre/Medium: Painting, canvas
About the work: Polaroid Portraits: Psyche’s Cosmic Captures, is a work designed to mimic a polaroid snapshot featuring the Psyche Goddess in front of the asteroid. The camera is set to focus primarily on the Goddess, resulting in intentionally softened details of the asteroid for a subtly blurred out background. The materials that were used were solely acrylic paint, with many of the colors mixed. My main goal was to create an artwork that didn’t overly emphasize adding intricate details across the whole piece but instead shifted the focus on specific parts of the painting. For this reason, I decided to add highlights to Psyche’s wavy, long hair, which reflects the colors of the Psyche Mission’s logo. This addition provides a vibrant contrast of colors against the shimmery dark background. To enhance texture, small butterfly details were added into her hair using cutouts of holographic cellophane film.
Psyche Inspired Overview
Psyche Inspired is a program that brings undergraduate students from any discipline or major together to share the excitement, innovation, and scientific and engineering content of NASA’s Psyche mission with the public in new ways through artistic and creative works. These works are posted in the gallery above and highlighted on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. View the full resolution images in the image gallery. This year’s Psyche Inspired cohort is known as the Tungsten Class.
Psyche Inspired was piloted at ASU during the 2017-2018 academic year. The following academic year, Psyche Inspired expanded nationally! The works from each Psyche Inspired cohort are collected in individual downloadable books that tell the story of Psyche through musical scores, sculptures, painting, 3-D models, photography, acrylic art, needlepoint, stop-motion films, mixed media, and more.
Click here to view all the Psyche Inspired books
Take a look at our comprehensive map that shows how the Psyche Inspired program has grown over the years!
