At half the diameter of Pluto, Charon is the largest satellite relative to its planet in the solar system. Many New Horizons scientists expected Charon to be a monotonous, crater-battered world; instead, they’re finding a landscape covered with mountains, canyons, landslides,surface-color variations and more.

It is called Charon because I have curiosity about the possibility of found life in other planets. I read some news about the details of the recent discovering of the Pluto's moon and this was very interesting for me. At first I thought about calling it Caronte (Charon Spanish translation) but it sounds like the bad guy of a movie and I decided that the name in English was better.

‘’Charon could have been formed by a collision around 4.5 billion years ago when a large object struck Pluto at high velocity, destroying itself and blasting off much of Pluto's outer mantle. However, such an impact should result in an frozen Charon and rockier Pluto.‘’
This artwork represent a glaciar environment where the first man who was walked on their surface looks a trophy made by a mahmooth fangs and a planet. The dome means like a shield which is protecting Pluto during the future collisions.

I want to do a Matte Painting like a off Earth landscape and the last news from NASA about the discover of the details of the Charon surface insipired me to realice an artwork like this.

- Rubén Álvarez

At first, I tried to find some images of a frozen surface or something like that,but finally I decided to use photos from a white desert, I did a lot of colour/texture corrections on it to create the surface. With photos of Mammoth fangs I did the pillars of the planet, which is a simple white shape textured. I spent a lot of time doing the dome, the atmosphere and correcting the lights which is the most important part of my works.

I tried to balance my low level in 3d modelling with my retouch skills , this is why I do all of my works totally in Photoshop. I got ideas from the official NASA web page when I was reading an article about the review of the last pictures from Pluto. I only tried to do an artwork better than my previous work, but it’s true that I wanted to give it a look like the a movie scene. I had a lot of fun when I was working on it and soon I will do another work which will be focused on a alien planet or something similar.

I am very perfectionist and this is cause I do a lot of revisions in my works but generally the most part are about light corrections when I finished the first half part of the project.

- Rubén Álvarez

About Rubén Álvarez

Rubén Álvarez is a 23 year old self-taught visual artist based in Spain and he has specialized in creative retouch, photo manipulation and digital matte painting. He creates individual and emotional works that will encourage the viewer to think about the topic. His works are fully developed in Photoshop, are focused on creating photorealistic scenes and represent his vision of nature communicating stories through images. You can find more of his works on his Behance profile.