I've always loved looking up at the night sky. So, to play around in Photoshop practicing new techniques, I made a series of cosmic and galactic images. These were fun to do and ranged from a few hours to a few days to complete.
To give this picture a more authentic galaxy feel, I used a series of galactic dust and starfield brushes developed by Sakura222-stock, who can be found here:
And a few of the brighter, individual stars were made with brushes designed by DemosthenesVoice, whose page is here:
I almost made a Photoshop replica of the Milky Way galaxy present-day, but wondered what it would have looked like before it took on its iconic form, when it was still forming.
This color palette was my favorite to work with. Since light isn't purely white, I wanted to show how all the colored gases and stardust came together to create a new sun. I also added color to the star itself in between layers of light, so that the white light is not one pure color.
Stepping back a little from the Sun, we see our system's first planets. The texture for Venus was fun and interesting to play with, because the original texture clip was a lot rougher and not cloudy like the planet's atmosphere.
Out of all these pieces, "Outer System" was the trickiest. Light was the focus of all the other works - but for this one, I didn't want to include Earth, trying to portray the formation of our home system from our point of view. Hence, I didn't want the Sun, or any star, as the focus. The hardest part was getting the shadows and highlights to match up amongst each celestial object.
This was actually the first picture I completed for this series. So, it's the first one I experimented with the nebular gases. Blues and purples are my favorite to work with; they feel ethereal. No other planets or objects appear in this, emphasizing how isolated this little planet feels.
I used the star brushes from DemosthenesVoice again for this one, as a blanket of stars over Sirius as he dreams among the stars. The dog in the photo is my dog, blended into the surrounding gases. I didn't want the stars to outline him or match up with his form, but to surround him as to make him one of them.
