![]() ![]() ![]() (There’s one coloring error that I fixed. The last step was to take a high-resolution photo of it and touch it up digitally. Then it was time for the distant part of the landscape:Īnd then the water: (I also went over the sky and the robe a second time here.)Īnd finally, I filled in the border and then went back to make some of the other colors a little more vibrant (especially in the heavenly realm): I picked what I thought of as vibrant, other-worldly colors: Then I spent a day coloring in the mysterious heavenly realm beyond the celestial sphere. On the second day, I colored in the sun, the moon, the tree in the foreground, and the robed figure: After an afternoon of coloring, I ended up with this: ![]() I wanted a sunset that faded from yellow to orange to red to lavender to deep purple. I began by picking out the colors I’d use for the sky. I ended up going with colored pencil, since yak’s blood has an unpleasant odor - and since the art teacher at my school was willing to let me borrow a set of Prismacolors. Water color? Colored pencil? Bolivian yak’s blood mixed with cuttlefish pigment? ![]() The original black-and-white image is in the public domain (available through Wikimedia), so I downloaded a high-resolution copy, had it printed on a 2-foot-by-3-foot piece of paper, and began to think about how I would color it in. When I searched for a poster of a colored version, I found one available for $430 - which was obviously out of the question. Interestingly, no one is sure where the image originally came from - whether Flammarion commissioned it for his book, engraved it himself, or found it in some now-lost repository. It’s called the Flammarion Engraving, after the French astronomer Camille Flammarion, in whose 1888 book it first appeared ( L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire). Some trial and error on Google eventually led me to it. It wasn’t until this fall (of 2017), as I was teaching a lesson on imaginary numbers, that I finally resolved to track it down and get a poster of it for my classroom. I couldn’t remember what it was called or where I’d seen it but over the last couple of years, the image had been coming to mind again and again, and I realized that I’d begun to think of it as one of the most profound pieces in the history of art - one that perfectly captures what it means to be a scholar, an inquirer, or anyone who feels compelled to break through boundaries. UPDATE: You can now get a poster of this at ![]()
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January 2023
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