An art piece I submitted for FURUM 2023, where the theme was "Space".

Presenting NGC 6188: The Dragons of Arà.

For this art piece, I've made two types - a nebula version and a constellation version. The nebula version (https://www.furaffinity.net/view/58533766/) was used for the conbook! And the constellation version depicts Elian and his dragon, Aurora, in a playful flight through space ✨

This piece was inspired by an actual nebula with the same NGC designation, and name. It blew me away and I've decided to do my own take of the nebula itself. The style of the nebula here is adopted from the imagery capabilities provided by the Hubble Space Telescope. While the James Webb Telescope is of recent technology and had higher resolution, the enigmatic colours brought on by the former convinced me to choose its style to capture silhouettes better.

A lot of hidden inspirations were scattered around this art piece:
- Binary star systems
- Globular star clusters
- Open star clusters
- Planetary Nebula inspired by NGC 7635 (Bubble Nebula)
- Pillars of Creation from M16 (Eagle Nebula)
- Mountains of Creation

Regarding the art design itself, I wanted something that displays contrasting halves - the warm morning orange from Aurora, and the bright and youthful aura of Elian. It took a while to play balance with the colours to make sure no halves overwhelm the other, carefully highlighting negative spaces with cyan/purple glow. Additionally, as much as I needed bright lights to bring out the silhouettes better, dark spaces were equally important if I'm gonna be scattering stars. Vignetting the piece with these dark spaces worked well and allowed me a little more freedom with star details. As for the constellations themselves, while I should've opted for lesser "key" stars, I felt that more stars would give the constellations better clarity in their forms when accompanied by the dark nebulous clouds.

I am overall very pleased with this piece, but I'm even prouder to see it beautifully used as a background for the conbook.~