This is my forth CGD project. It is for a national art contest, this years theme is "My Favorite Place", but the teacher assigned it as a class project. I'm not a boring guy so this one isnt done yet. I'm waiting for a sunny day so that I can get some good stock photos so that I can insert myself into this. Rather then the typical this is a photo of the beach that I went to as a child or here I am being held by my boyfriend (some girls did that, not me ) with hearts all over it, I'm doing a state of mind.


Pleasure. My happy place.

I'm gonna add some cool lighting effects at the top, plenty of gradient swirls, and a nebula if I can. Also I want a pirate ship in the back ground.

As far as how i did it:

This is 2 renders, i made the bottom render without clouds so that i could add a black gradient to put my stars on. Then I added a second render with clouds, and it was brighter aswell. I set the blending mode to overlay or darken (I forget which). The planet was made using a satellite photo of Alberta I got from Google Earth then I used basic planet makin techniques. I added some glows and clouds to it then an athmosphere and inserted it between the to render layers. Finally I used the shape tool on a new layer to add the stars, duplicated and blurred them to give em a glow. As far as the rest of the stuff goes I'm in uncharted waters for myself. I'm not good at editing photos so we'll see how well I can get edited in. I'm still waiting wait for a good stock operatunity, so once I get one I'll take it.

As far as whats happened since the last one you saw, I added the ship like I said. Its a vector of a real ship I traced in Illustrator which I exported and put here. I also made the bubbles out of lens flares that I converted into brushes and made them get bigger with using the tablet pen pressure.

Please tell me what you think of the new stuff I added to it. Tell me if it looks real... or surreal. I want both lol. I'm moving the previous version to scraps so that you can compare.
Hope ya like it, and please leave constructive critisism! I want this to be the best it can be! SO LEAVE COMMENTS!

Link to previous version: [link]

Time taken: Bout 6 hours (lots of sitting and thinking)
Programs used: Terragen, Google Earth, Photoshop CS2, Illustrator CS2,
Stock from: deviantArt(I'll find the exact person later)

Enjoy,
= Devin

PS, if ya like it check back for updates I'll try and have it done by next Friday.