Itheria's Cage

I'm very new to space art. I've been into space art lately and this is the first piece I was kinda satisfied with. C&C very much appreciated.

Link:
http://img524.imageshack.us/img524/4431/itheria0jf.png

OH wow that is very good man, 9/10. How did you make this ive seen them so much and i wanna try this but its just so complicated.. i dont wanna tut this i wanna do it my own way but i want to know what tools u used.

there needs to be more stars for depth
and the nebula sticks out to much

you'll need to either balance with star colors/star dust or tone it down

Quote:

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Originally posted by vin@10 Minutes Ago
there needs to be more stars for depth
and the nebula sticks out to much

you'll need to either balance with star colors/star dust or tone it down

[snapback]137591[/snapback]

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I wanted the nebula to stick out the most, but I kinda see what you're saying.
The reason the stars are so light is because of the light from the nebula. When light is reflected against someone's eye, some of the lighter stuff become harder to see for that person. It's sort of like light pollution and how it blocks you from seeing the night sky sometimes. If you look close enough, you'll see a lot more stars. They're extremely light , but they're there. Don't know, I might be wrong. Thx for the comment. Appreciate it very much.

@Antidote
Thx man. I'm glad you like it. I'd love to help you out, but I'm a newbie at space art. I don't wanna give you the wrong ways. All I can say is experiment with a few tutorials and then use your ideas to make your own piece. You should ask Rabieshund. He can give you more help than I can. I'm still have more things to learn about space art.

AntidotexXx: Please stop rating people's art. We don't do that here, we express it in words instead.

Anyways, that is pretty good! Here comes some tips you might find handy though.

- Don't make you space scene too crowded. I know it's fun to have planets in, but try to limit yourself. Four planets that are so close to eachother makes it look a bit "hnnnng, just ONE more planet..", which is a bit bad. :P

- The starfield is nothing you should rush. A good starfield is often a very important part of the scene. It can add alot depth and gives an overall spacey feeling, and we want that, right? ;) So I'd say work on the starfield here. Make more small stars that looks like they are further away than the other stars. Duplicate the layer, add some gaussian blur and give it a redish color to make it blend in nicely. :)

- The lightsource is good and strong, but a trick to make something really interesting is hiding the light a bit with some cloud. It can still be a strong lightsource, but then it's not that obvious. Also, you can easily see that you just threw in a basic 105mm lens flare. We want to make it look like a realistic lightsource, and therefore we have to do some smart stuff to the lens flare. I know I wrote this in another thread, so I'm sorry for repeating myself, hehe.
1. New layer. Make a eliptical selection with the eliptical marquee tool (:o), make it as big as you want it. To make it perfectly round, hold Shift. Also try holding Alt, blah blah blah...
2. Fill it black!
3. Add you lens flare, the same one as you used up there.
4. Go Filter > Blur > Radial Blur and blur it quite alot with both zoom and spin (is it really called "spin"? I have the Swedish version.. :D).
5. Deselect and set the layers blending mode to Screen or Linear dodge (they have different effects, I almost always use Linear dodge for strong lightsources).
6. Open up levels and pull the grey arrow in the middle to the right until the visible edges of the lens flare is gone.
7. w00t! Done!

Hnng, I always write these small tutorials in my posts.. XD I believe I will have to write a bigger tutorial that covers more sometime.

- Colors! The colors make the scene come alive. This scene is very monotone since it has only one color. If you look at any real nebula, you find that it's FULL of all kinds of colors. The only problem is that it is hard as HELL to make a really good nebula that includes many different colors. I know only one artist who makes them completely realistic and pwning, and that is Hameed Nawaz. Buuuuut, if you don't want to go with the über realistic stuff, you don't have to. Artists like Greg Martin often uses like two colors in one scene. One warm color and one cold color (think about that warm and cold colors thingy, it's pretty important), like red and blue. An artist that uses only one color in most of his scenes is Alyn Hunter. I actually think it is because he has a bad sense of colors. I mean, he pwns at all the technical stuff, but if we look with our artist eyes, we can see that he only uses one color. Therefore he presses in 100000009 details in one scene so the viewer will be interested longer, hehe. But enough talking now, I have to go to bed.

Hell I talk too much. Hope it helped a bit though.

Rabie I was actually waiting for your comment. Thx a lot for taking your time to write that out. I'll definitely remember those tips if I make another space piece.

Lol i rate because im speechless. doenst mean its bad or good it just means what i think... and besides i have a broken hand im not even supposed to be using that hand to type so.... its hard.
Anyways i would love to learn how to make that man.
Good job

sweet love it if i was to actually rate it would be 9/10

didnt u hear rahishait!?? no rating u militiaman!!
It is pretty good.. too bad u wont show me how to make it :(

this is incredible and the highlights around the cloud loks amazing and the same with the planets but i think you should do a few more stars but only round the first planet

Rabieshund raised a few good points which I agree with, but also in my opinion most space art is now all the same the nebula cloud seems overdone in most pieces, like everyone is using the exact same thing. The planets don't look too bad but they do not have enough texture, a bit of work on them and it'll look a bit better and alter the nebula colours as rabieshund said, they are way too monotone. Keep trying, you'll get it.

I agree with Catalyst, the planets don't have enough texture.

Rabie - It is called Spin in the Engrish version. (Yes I put Engrish on purpose.)

Try maybe making the Nebula a bit more simple, it looks too...out there for this piece.

Nice job man, I'm seeing a lot of improvement from you.

Thx for all the comments guys. I really appreciate it. I'll take all the tips into consideration.

I like how the orange thingy bursts light ( :huh: ) ... The lightning on the planets is in the good direction (?)...

Planets need more texture (as said before)

Great one!

ur planets seem a little flat, when i did mine the easiest way i found to make the planet have depth was to spherize it... but!

if u do it to a regular size planet it will distort it. so... make each planet as large as possible , ie. 3000*3000 or something so u get as much detail as possible. Select it and spherize a few times then , maybe 2 or 3... then shrink ur planet down to desired size and u wont lose as much quality.

Thx. I'll try that next time.