Planetscape #1

So working my way through still, I posted the brief I'm working on separately so its nice a neat to keep track of.
So to start off I figured some concept style art of some nice space backdrops in Photoshop will help me get inspired - and at the same time help me brush off my Photoshop skills which admittedly haven't been touched since college so I'm a little out of touch.

To be honest I got inspired to start this all after watching the Stan Winston School video for character creation in Photoshop. I also downloaded a lot of the brushes that the main artist used as he so nicely put them up for download on his DA page.

So to start with I settled on an idea of a tech planet, and started off by playing around with a new set of brushes while planning out the basic scene I wanted.
Here is the final result of what I ended up with:

The backdrop with the stars and nebular  was created with the new brushes and playing around with various filters which was fun to tinker around with.

So here's where all the learning and research starts:
I brushed up on a few skills when starting the planet, coming across a nice tutorial on creating a ground like texture online. I played around with creating several textures to use in other scenes and started to adjust and colour the planet itself in. It's a technique that's was very handy to pick up for future planet designs.
As I wanted a very tech biased planet I thought being able to see the cities and lights from space would be very interesting and provide me with a second technique to learn. I had a Google around for some lights from space tutorials, a lot of them said the same thing but I wasn't happy with part of the tutorial regarding colour and lighting so I played around with it until I got something that I was happy with. It does look a bit low res but I'm happy with what Iv got for now. I know green is a typical colour for tech sci-fi but I wanted to use something with that level of green.
I finished it off with the sunflare and moon and left it at that. Overall very happy with how this turned out and alot of lessons to take over to the other planetscapes.

To summarize:   

• Created Space scene #1 in Photoshop
• Picked up some handy lessons in planet textures and shading in layers
• Picked up a helpfully lessons in city lights that may need re-doing in more definition in future
• Enjoyed creating clouds / gas so much to carry over in the next scene