I said I was gonna do this months ago and totally forgot so uh.
OK so basically, the main trick to this is COOL COLORS and interesting textures.
this was one of the first planets I ever made, and while it’s not exactly one of my best products, it’s a somewhat ok example of the kind of thing you might want to do. by the time this tutorial is over, you will hopefully be able to do something WAY COOLER than this.
thankfully, my planets aren’t the only examples I can use here, because as it turns out some asshole named andy hussrew or something made a shitton of them and they’re REALLY GOOD.
the land of wind and shade is the first planet in homestuck that we ever see. in my opinion, it’s one of the best looking, and there are a lot of reasons for that. first of all, the bright blues and bluegreens contrast really well against the black sea and grey clouds. this isn’t a color theory tutorial though so I can’t really help you pick colors. just make it look good ok
second great thing about LOWAS is that the texture of the land below makes the hand-drawn gradient cloud layer actually look good. always, always, ALWAYS use textures or some random shit you’ve pulled of google images when doing this kind of thing. well, unless your planet is the land of flat and red, in which case you can just draw a huge goddamn red circle and be happy, nice job asshole.
third great thing about LOWAS is that it pops out! it obviously looks like a round sphere, which is helpful when you’re trying to make a planet that is a round sphere. this is actually a really easy effect to pull off, and you need almost 0 actual knowledge or shapes or perspective to do it.
let’s walk through how hussie probably did this.
STEP 1: GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH SOME COOL LOOKIN TEXTUREY SHIT
here I’m using some starry night sky picture because chicks dig that shit. yeah woo let’s go look at the stars all sentimental and stuff
the higher the resolution the better! this image is 1280x1024, which is fucking huge but kind of necessary, and you’ll see why in a second.
STEP 2: GET SOME IMAGE EDITING PROGRAM AND EDIT THE SHIT OUT OF THAT IMAGE UNTIL IT’S NO LONGER RECOGNIZABLE
the first thing I did was sharpen/brightness/contrast to reduce some of the depth and make it look more like a mysterious, dark land covered in shiny mushrooms and silly yellow salamanders.
also, GREYSCALE (unless you want to keep the colors of your image exactly the way they are)
now, duplicate the layer three or four times. assuming you know how change hue saturation, make each layer a different pretty color. if I were you, I would choose a few colors in a somewhat close range (here I’ll be using reds and purples).
now, on all layers except the bottom one, you can take some blurry, low-opacity eraser and just go to town on those beautiful layers. mix em up so the image has a really pretty and awesome color range.
when you’re done, just merge the layers, and bam, you have a thing.
if you did it right, it should look kinda like this. wow cool!!! color filters are rad. and you gave the image an interesting color range without covering up the awesome starry texture of the image, which is what would happen if you just tried painting over it.
now, probably the hardest step. if you weren’t already using one, I’d suggest getting a tablet out now.
ADDITIONAL STUFF FOR THIS STEP: maybe you don’t want the land to be all one texture? maybe you want it crazy and rough looking like the planet I showed you at the beginning of this post? well, go find more textures, throw them down, play with color filters some more, and keep fucking with it until it looks nice. you may have to use a lot of layers.
STEP 3: DRAW SOME OCEANS AND RIVERS (skip this step if you ain’t got liquids on your planet)
the oil of LOWAS is easy to draw, because it’s all one color. This means he didn’t have to use any texture for the ocean, and it still looks good. if you want to do a solid color ocean, just skip this, but I think that I’m going to do something special and have an ocean of piss BEAUTIFUL GOLDEN WATER so I’m going the extra mile now.
I’m gonna google something like “water texture” and play with it a bit.
the image I chose is kind of huge. whoops.
first thing I did was scale the image down to fit my canvas, putting it on a layer below my terrain. then I did the standard brightness/contrast/greyscale stuff. I could do filters, but instead I’m just going to make this a solid color, because the terrain I made is crazy enough already.
bam. beautiful sea of piss. ok.
nooooooow you’re gonna take an eraser tool and erase parts of your water to make land formations. if you’re like me, you’re probably going to suck at this and instantly hate everything and want to give up.
“hey, even without the urine, this doesn’t look good at ALL!”
well, here’s something you can do. go find a map! if it’s a map of earth, somebody’s probably going to recognize it and call you out on it, so I would recommend randomly generating a map that suits your needs.
make sure the map projection is square, and the image height is enough to suit your needs. I’m using the full height of 2000, because it’s easier to scale down than up.
the map will take a while to generate. be patient.
this is the map I got! I tried to get as much mixing of land and water as possible.
I chose my favorite part of the map and fit it to the canvas. alright, cool!
after that, I used the magic wand tool with a medium tolerance and selected as much water as I could. then, I switched to the terrain layer, and deleted that from it.
suddenly, I have a strange world of piss and mystery!
if you want to add some rivers like the ones on LOWAS, or you just want to edit the geography a bit, get out your eraser tool and have fun! neato.
finally, you’re gonna want to posterize the image, because for some reason that’s a thing that hussie does and yeah ok sure whatever.
STEP 4: MAKE SOME CLOUDS (obviously, skip if you don’t want clouds)
make a new layer! now’s a good time to turn off anti-aliasing, since otherwise you’ll have some gross edges.
use a solid color and just make cloud-y shapes all over. this is kind of heartbreaking because a lot of your beautiful work gets covered up, but it’s also an opportunity to choose the best stuff to show off! if there was a bad balance between amounts of land and sea before, you can cover up more of one than the other to make things look better. as you’ll notice, I covered up most of the tragic piss ocean because it was huge and ugly, and piss must exist in moderation.
you can add more or less clouds than I did depending on what you need. if your planet is covered in a thick fog, try using a lighter shade and only showing little patches of land! if your planet is a mostly sunny place, you can just throw down cute little cloud blotches.
now, if you want the clouds to look even better, select them with the magic wand tool and replace them with a circular gradient of two similar colors, one light and one dark, to show off the fact that spheres are round and when light hits them, some areas are darker than others.
I was a dumbass and accidentally used a linear gradient which looks terrible. don’t do what I did, ok?
the moment you’ve all been waiting for!
if you haven’t already, change the dimensions of your image so that it’s actually a square.
to do this, I used the lens distortion filter in GIMP. you can use pretty much anything that makes something look like this.
as you can see, the middle area has barely changed size at all, but the outsides are tiny! super tiny! dang! and that’s why your image had to be ridiculously hi-res. spheres are fuckin crazy.
crop your bulge to make it a circle, and resize it so it’s somewhere between 500 and 600 pixels wide. hey, we’re almost there!
now, put your sphere thingy on a canvas of about 700x700, so you have some room to work with.
the first thing you want to do is MAKE SURE YOU HAVE ANTI-ALIASING OFF. then use an eraser to go around the edge of the sphere and give it that beautiful, pixely border everybody loves.
if you can use the paint bucket tool to fill in a solid color around your planet without any ugly border then you’ve done it right! congrats.
I used this opportunity to fix my awful gradient mistake from earlier, and retouch the edges to give it a little depth, since the clouds are obviously floating above the ground.
well, that looks pretty good, right? maybe we’re done touching up?
if you look at the hi res image, you’ll notice that the once crisp, clear, beautiful terrain is now ugly and blurry, and that just won’t do! this needs to be dealt with.
I used the magic wand tool to select everything but the clouds, then applied another heap of sharpen and posterize.
and now that’s done with.
STEP 7: ADD EXTRA DETAILS
draw some clouds! wow cool. clouds sure do look pretty great.
if you want, you can also add a house with a little light grey line on top.
and that’s pretty much it!
it’s all about textures, color fixtures, sharpness, and depth. combine any amount of these different elements to create what you need.
if you need any more help, just send me an ask and I’ll respond as soon as I can!
enjoy wasting hours of your life on making fake planets.
LOWAS looks so much better than the land of piss and mystery because hussie is a better artist than I am. he did a better job with color choice, making the clouds dark enough to match up well with the land below. also, it’s more than likely that he didn’t use the bulge effect when making the clouds, and is just good at drawing that sort of thing. you can try that too! play around with colors, and methods. don’t limit yourself to the few simple tricks I’ve given you! become better at this than I am.
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