Travel the Solar System at 1g

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This is my new graphic, and indeed my first artwork I’ve posted that isn’t (wholly) an oil painting, depicting a transit map of the solar system, like what might exist in my science fiction setting that has been host to all three of my science fiction romance novels (and a fourth one I’m working on now!).

The gorgeous backdrop of this graphic is the 1875 painting “Night” by Alexandre Auguste Hirsch, depicting a fair and pretty girl floating on a cloud in the nude, alseep by the look of her, through the night sky, which could just as easily be evocative of the feeling of traveling in space between planets in speed and comfort, just like the nuclear-pulse-powered spaceliners that are available in my science fiction setting during the twenty-first century and later.

The big circles on the darling’s body are the major planets, in order from toe to right breast Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The circles on the lines radiating out from her gorgeous centerline are the major (defined as planetary-mass) moons of each planet in order from closest to furthest from their mother planets. In Earth’s case it’s the Moon, and in, for example, Jupiter’s case it’s Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

The idea is that each spaceliner goes from planet to planet and then those who want to go to the moons transfer to separate spaceliners once they reach the planet. Obviously this isn’t an exact depiction of every flight profile, but the graphic is supposed to be stylized anyway, sort of an advertisement of faster (and presumably more expensive) space transportation.

This was one of my more fun efforts so far in visual art. I’ve actually been toying around with the idea of making a transit-map-style depiction of constant-acceleration space travel since summer 2020, but none of my ideas were satisfactory. Then today I got the idea of making the curve follow the line of a feminine body from head to toe that was restfully being carried off on a cloud of love, and I knew that Hirsch’s “Night” would make an excellent background and visual guide. The background could even be dispensed with altogether, but it’s so much lovelier with the girl, isn’t it? Enjoy my latest artwork, “Travel the Solar System at 1g”.