Space Art

Just prior to Christmas I went through a frenzy of creativity, making a number of new space-art images. This is one of them.

You're standing on (floating in?) Saturn, looking up through the hydrogen, helium, amonia and methane gasses of the atmosphere that give the planet its characteristic yellow color. Through a break in the clouds you can see part of the inner rings and one of the shepherd moons that orbits along the inner edge of the ring system.

I made this image primarily with two tools -- Carrara and Photoshop (a little in Elements and a little in CS1). The clouds are volumetric objects created in Carrara, and the ring system is an extrueded spline with a procedural shader applied to create the bands. Once I rendered the image in Carrara, I took it into Photoshop and played with the color and levels, mixing a couple versions together, playing with the transfer modes and such. A peach-colored gradient adds some color to the sky.

All in all, it was a fairly simple project, but one that resulted in an image I'm happy with. This appeals to me as a "Space Art" image because it flies in the face of what I think most people expect of space art -- lots of dark space with stars. Of course, a fair number of my space art projects also involve dark space and stars, but it's nice to shake things up every so often....