Presented by Meininger Art Supply and Watson Guptill Publishers, world-renowned space artist Michael Carroll, will be signing his new book, SPACE ART, How to Draw and Paint Planets, Moons and Landscapes of Alien Worlds. Mike will also be demon-strating his landscape painting techniques as he paints a Mars vista!

Book Description Artists have been imagining otherworldly landscapes for hundreds of years—but only in the past few decades have we started to see what other planets and moons really look like. These exciting scientific discoveries have led to ever more "realistic" space art. Space Art shows artists how to capture and create these partly real, partly imagined vistas by combining the latest facts with traditional landscape drawing. Put the two together and the results are memorable, dreamlike, haunting.

Author Michael Carroll, one of the country’s most distinguished astronomical artists, explains how to use washes and texturing, how to paint water and ice, rocks and geological formations, craters and alien skies. Linear and atmospheric perspective, color, composition, color, value, and shading are also covered as they relate to showing otherworldly landscapes. Fourteen paintings, building in complexity, are presented step-by-step, accompanied by NASA photos and the author’s own photos of mysterious landscapes closer to home: Death Valley, Iceland, Alaska. For everyone who has ever wanted to travel to far-off worlds…or just show what they’re imagining…Space Art is a rocket to the stars.

About the Author

Michael Carroll has done commissioned work for NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and his paintings have appeared in Time, Smithsonian, National Geographic, Astronomy and Space & Telescope magazines, on television programs such as Nova and Cosmos, and in books by Carl Sagan and other writers. One of his paintings flew aboard the Russian space station Mir, and another is resting at the bottom of the Atlantic, aboard Russia’s ill-fated Mars 96 spacecraft. Carroll has also written and illustrated a dozen children’s books on science and the universe and, along with artists Kim Poor and Rick Sternbach, was the first co-president of the International Association of Astronomical Artists (IAAA). He lives with his family in Littleton, Colorado.

Images © Michael Carroll
Text © 2007 Watson-Guptill Publications