At the request of a Redditor I’m going to detail the creation of a space art pic.

This is by no means a tutorial, rather more of a workflow illustration and a collection of actual tutorials.

Here we go….

Starfield.

naturally, no space pic is complete without stars, so we start there. There are many tutorials for starfields and I’ve used a few, but This one is by far the most versatile. (I scaled the brush up for the closer stars in the nebula)

I’m not sure if I used this method for this piece but it’s all I use now. hue jitter will add a lot of depth to your stars but don’t over do it. and remember, there are no green stars. Only white, yellow, orange, red, and blue. you can get away with purple, pink, and teal but be careful.

Nebula.

Now our space would look a little boring without some pretty gasses to look at, so next we add a nebula. Again, there are a lot of ways to do this and to each his own. Here, I used two main techniques; This one, and a bit of This one. also, not mentioned in the second one is rendering difference clouds on top of the clouds you already rendered. this adds a lot more detail to you clouds. I recommend masking off parts of your nebula before you render the difference clouds, for more diversity.

The Planet/s.

Using just the above steps can still yield some epic space art, but most people like to have some planets in the scene. Now if you don’t already know how to make a basic planet in Photoshop or Gimp I am a little disappointed in you… -_- But I’ll enlighten you none the less. Of all the space tuts, the planet is the most prevalent. There are to many to count. most of them use the same methodology. This one will get the job done, although I highly recommend using a stock texture or making one buy either stitching satellite pics together or painting from scratch. I used This because I’m a lazy bastard. ;3 I added the city lights myself.

Rings.

While entirely optional, rings go a long way to making eye-catching space art. Now there are a lot of so-called ring tutorials advocating a technique of twirling some clouds/noise to attain ‘Rings’ (though no actual rings are present). DO NOT LISTEN TO THEM!

Planetary rings are concentric, unbroken circles. That being said I used this method to achieve my rings (I winged it after step 13). I also added some color noise and then brought the saturation almost all the way back down to get a more realistic color range. After that I painted in some extra 'cloudy bits’ using brush settings to create a sort of cloud brush. playing with these settings is fun and can yield a lot of variation. (a lot of the ideas in the star brush tut are useful here) the most important parts are low opacity, randomness of brush shape/size, dual brush, airbrush, texture, and foreground/background jitter in color dynamics with a light foreground color and a dark BG color. Again, play with it until you are painting little clouds with each stroke.

[Note. an art tablet really comes in handy here. (even super cheap ones) setting opacity/size/whatnot to be controlled by pressure makes realism much easier.]

and finally…

Lighting.

Now this step is really the hardest to really lay out. some people like scenes where the light source is not in the frame. I don’t. Big dramatic lens flairs make my loins stir. That being said, if you are serious about your space art, you simply cannot use the stock PS lens flairs. They may look cool at first, but I assure you, they are the Wilhelm Scream of space art. once you’re familiar with them, you can spot them a mile away. You can do a lot with making your own flares, like this or you can be lazy like me and get Optical Flares. It lets you pick from dozens of presets or cobble together your own flares. Soooo many settings! I recommend getting the flair you like and then rendering it’s separate elements individually so you can change blending options/blur and whatnot to get just the right look. also, if you have a misty mood in your pic and have objects in the way of the light, use the polygon laso and make some big dramatic shadows coming off of them. then blur and reduce opacity until only a subtle shadow remains. this really adds depth.

So that’s how I made “Far From Home”. Thanks for reading and Happy Space Art!

One last thing. You might be wondering where I got thousands of dollars of worth software. To that I can only say, YARRRRRRRRRRR, ME HEARTIES!!