A remastered version of my other planet this matte painting is a lot better. Still I will provide a recap on how I achieved my final painting. I began with a document size around 1200 width 1600 height both in pixels with a transparent background. To the transparent background I filled it with white and low opacity. Then with a soft brush I scattered some black around. Next was to make some clouds. You can do this with render clouds under filter tab. I used difference clouds and is also located under the filter tab. I repeated this process at least three times and put them in their own layers. With my first set of clouds I added a gradient overlay to put my colors in. Next I began with the star layer. To do this in a good way you can also find a useful tool under the filter tab called noise. Make a new layer filled with black and under the filter tab find noise. You want to make sure Gaussian and monochromatic are checked. After you get your noise you want to use levels to bring out some brighter “stars”. You can do this process twice if you like. Still working on my atmosphere I wanted to add some extra color. I simply picked a color I wanted filled it in a new layer and with a soft brush I erased the color away. Lastly I took away from the edges painting a black edged outline because its outer space and black is necessary. To bring everything together that I had so far I added a color balance adjustment layer. Now working the planet, moon, and asteroid was my next goal. First I did these two light explosion circles by using a large hard brush and added an outer glow to it. Then to add to this explosion I added light rays. To get light rays you start by using a brush with dissolve checked. After you get a stroke you like add a radial blur from the filter tab. Also make sure you have zoom and best checked when using blur from the filter tab to get light rays. Now to the earth many different shades were added to it by using the brush tool. Some black, white, and blue shades where added to spots where needed. Lastly to finish up earth another color back was applied. The moon was transformed by using hue/saturation and color balance to get a fitting piece. Finally with the rock I thought a different way to use it. I used a clone stamp tool on it and started to paint the earth where it was colliding with the moon. I wanted to use the rock because it had a good texture that seem like magma and rock from the earth core. I also used the clone stamp from the rock to make the debris floating from earth. To make the colors fit hue/saturation and color was used once more. Lastly just to incorporate the rock I added it to the bottom flying past earth as it smashed into by the moon. I used a lasso tool to get the stream behind the rock. I then used the gradient tool to get colors I wanted, but I couldn’t get the colors to fit so I applied luminosity from the blending options. The rock is supposed to be a shooting star but that’s irony as earth is being destroyed.  

Creating custom brushes can be done in Photoshop are useful for adding textures. For my brushes I gathered a few images from flicker.com. Each of the images was enhanced by using the levels tool. Brightness/contrast was used to touch up a few images along with the shadow/highlights tool. For the water drops and spider web the lasso tool was used to get a selection I wanted. Only for the ground with cracks I converted the image mode into grayscale, then use Threshold to isolate the cracks. My other two images were left as is. The next step after getting my custom brush selections was to modify them with preset option. My best preset brush was the cracks brush. It develops good cracks that could be used for walls or ground images. The bark and spider web brushes were so so and I could be improved after explain my troubles for other brushes. Some problems I had are getting the brush to be realistic and also to flow well. For example the water drop brush was something I had in mind that I thought ideally could be used on any object. After doing an image adjustment and making my selection I had spent some time in the preset option but I could get what I wanted. Along with the rust brush I wanted to create a texture but as much I played around with the preset it seems like I couldn’t make a difference. The most I got from the preset options was different shades. In the end some images worked better than the other.