GALAXY, part 5

Having chosen the spiral end of ABORTIVE ATTEMPT #3 as my Phase I of the GALAXY project, I needed a sketch to estimate exactly how many rings it would take to pull it off.

I fired up Pixelmator and got to work. I found a spiral on the intertubes that was exactly what I needed, created little rings, gave them a little glowy white “shadow,” duplicated the heck out of them, and dragged them around. Add a solid black layer, and presto:

A couple of things here.

• That’s 180ish rings, way more than I thought I would need. As I note on the page, I can probably thin those out.

• I also didn’t really scale the rings; this is really just a proof-of-concept sketch.

• Usually when I draw a spiral or a labyrinth, it’s a “left,” i.e., you head to the left when you enter. That is probably tied to my being right-handed: you feel “righter” by curving to the right after you enter. This spiral heads to the right, so it’s going to be subconsciously more unsettling to most people.

After finishing this, I began to play with it, and after relearning a couple of features/tools, I surprised myself with a quasi-perspective view:

This, then, is kind of what the wandering hippie would see as they strolled along Lake Ruby, and this view is what makes me keep working on this project to get it ready for next year.