Assignment 1: 'Skyscape'

Well, quality is obviously lost when posting Photoshop artwork on your blog, but oh well, it's done! Here is 'Skyscape,' and though it isn't much, it's my first "space art." I really just wanted to try and make a planet on Photoshop, so my first assignment for my Motion Graphics class provided me with a great excuse to finally try it.

For the planet, I used a photograph of some granite, cloned the heck of out it onto a larger canvas, then used the elliptical tool to trim it into a circular shape. Then I applied the 'spherize' distortion effect a few times to make it more...spherical. From there I added several more textures at various levels of color, saturation, and opacities to make the planet's surface not look so much like granite.

I left that alone for a bit and turned my attention to the atmosphere, that glowy part of the planet. I made three layers of three circles, the bottom one a base color, the middle the atmosphere, and the top the shadow. I added an inner glow, outer glow, and inner shadow to the atmosphere as well as its bluish color, then set the layer to screen. The planet's shadow has a gaussian blur added to it at 100 points, then I moved it underneath the atmosphere level. I stretched the shadow really big to give a softer sort of blur across the upper left of the planet. As a result, though, I had to give the shadow layer a mask and 'erase' all of the extra shadow hanging off the lower right end of the circle so it wouldn't interfere with the sky I would be putting behind it. (Don't worry, Ben, when I say 'erase' I mean I painted over what I wanted gone...or whatever the technical terminology is!) It was a pain, and I'm sure there is a smarter way of going about getting rid of it...someone let me know. Finally I applied the original planet's surface texture above the base color layer and below the shadow and atmosphere layers.

The starry background is simply made up of monochromatic noise (which I tweaked so the stars wouldn't look so uniform) with a colored layer over it at 50% opacity. The space dust is a composite of various keyed-out photos of clouds with varying levels of opacity. It looked a lot nicer at its full resolution. At this size, the space clouds look a little too messy for my liking

Anyway, I enjoyed finally making a planet. I really wanted to make this into a Firefly tribute and add Serenity in there somewhere but I ran out of time. I just finished the TV series (I know, I'm like 5 years late or whatever) and I am oh so sad it's over. :( Anyway, like I said, this is my first space art so I'm sorry it looks amatuerish. Practice makes perfect! I'll just have to make a few solar systems to get really good. :)

~Becca