This one started as a smear of turquoise paint on a scrap of mat board.

I often keep scraps of paper or mat board near me when I'm working so I can quickly check the color and pigment load I have on a brush before setting it to the painting I’m working on.

As I went darker with the turquoise color on the main painting, I kept adding marks to the mat board until I had layers of different values of turquoise crosses overlapping each other on the mat board. It began to look like a spacesuited figure to me.

As I worked on my main painting, I would lean over every so often and add a detail here and there to give the picture more resolution.