Finished, the colours are a bit off as I’m painting under electric light. I’ve tried to get accurate details on it although I’m still wanting it to be painterly. I don’t want my paintings to look airbrushed or filtered.

It’s the old analogue or digital argument. Everything is HD these days. But I’m not trying to get photo realism, just realism. So, now I’m going to leave this. If I have a night’s sleep I might be able to come back to it. There are thousands of craters and trenches and rills and canyons on Mars. It’s a rocky planet with a very thin atmosphere. It can be completely covered by dust storms and the details of the surface can be covered over. The carbon dioxide poles shrink and grow dependent on the seasons. In the past the surface was imagined to be covered with canals (a misinterpretation of the Italian word Canali – meaning channels). Astronomers thought the dark patches were vegetation. Now we know Mars is a rocky, desert planet. About two thirds the size of Earth with lower gravity. It has lost most of its atmosphere and water over billions of years, probably because its molten core has solidified and it now has no magnetic shield to stop solar radiation from causing the atmosphere to stream away into space.