Coyote Blog

Earlier I tried drawing Earth-like planets.  I wanted to try a gas giant.  Here is the first shot at it:

Most of this is like the last project.  The difference is in coming up with the flat map for a banded gas giant rather than for land and oceans.  I finally cracked the code at the suggestion of someone online.  I wanted to create the bands in great detail, but drawing line after line in different colors seemed tedious.  He suggested taking a one pixel wide slice from a picture and then spreading it horizontally to get lines.  I used a slice through the red rocks near Sedona,  giving me nice Jovian colors.  I then blurred the lines and then used Photoshop liquify and a pen tablet to squiggle the lines.

The rest is just a series of overlays to give the colors a bit more variance, and the halo and dark side like the planets before.

The detail is pretty satisfying

I guess I am easily distracted by geeky stuff.  Yesterday I needed a fake / fantasy planet for a piece of art I am working on.  So I thought I would just go find something open-source-ish someone else has done.  That would have been the obvious 60-second solution.

But then I saw this site, which apparently is one for enthusiasts of - you guessed it - making planet and space art.  So I thought I would play around with it.  About 6 hours on the computer later, I have a planet and a lot of tools to make more, and actually had a surprising amount of fun doing it.  First, the planet, click to enlarge:

The image you get when you click on it is only about a quarter of the full resolution of 5000x5000 of the original.

This is all done in Photoshop, faking the 3D and lighting effects, though there are tutorials and that same site discussing how to do this even better using 3D rendering.  To make this, I started with a planet map using this tutorial.  The land image I used as a texture seed is here.  The final map looks like this (again I had to cut the resolution by 75% from the original 8000x4000).

The above was a bit dark so I ended up stacking two on top of each other with the top set to blend mode "screen" and this really made it pop.  The cloud map I used a portion of is apparently a favorite among planet illustrators -- you can find it here.  Again, here it is but reduced in size:

From these last two we select a large circle (of the same size from each) and spherize them in Photoshop.

Here it is before the atmosphere and shadow effects, which are layered on and can be adjusted after the fact

Then, follow the second half of this tutorial when he talks about atmosphere and shadows to get the final result.

And the shadow can go the other way as well:

If anyone is really interested, I can send you the photoshop file with all the layers so you can see how it works.  Update:  The files are huge, about 500MB each, in part because I leave copies of all the resources I use in hidden layers.  But here they are, one for the flat map and one for the planet:    http://climatemovie.s3.amazonaws.com/planet test.psd  and here:  http://climatemovie.s3.amazonaws.com/continents.psd

I like to send my daughter, the artist, examples of people working in new media to help inspire her.  This is pretty amazing -- 3D painting in layers of acrylic.  These are NOT objects embedded in the clear plastic, its all painting in thin layers, like a 3D printer.

Been away a bit, and trying to catch up today.  Here is something to tide you over - wow

This is an original work by my daughter, with a bit of help from me, with a bi-directional interlocking tile, ala Escher (in pen and ink, on poster board).  This is actually surprisingly hard to pull off.  Though Escher did birds, he did not do a swan in this style.  As usual, click to enlarge:

The trick is to take a square piece of paper, and rotate whatever you cut from two sides to the other two adjacent sides.  We destroyed a lot of post it notes until we got there.  You can still see the ghost of the original square, with corners at the tip of the swan's head, the top of its wing, under its wing, and at the bottom of the neck.