UPDATE (August 17th): Fixed the biggest stars, now they are of different size. I had them like this, but somehow I didnt notice them in the final version.

A nice come-back thingie that i made over the vacation. This one has an interesting story going for it, but i'll share it at the end, after the technical information.

All photoshop, all brushing, custom brushes (by me), 1.5GB, 14 different versions made, wacom graphire 2 (now belongs to my cousin), over 200 layers (cause honestly, i lost count).

Pros: I like the shapes and how the 2 blend together. The top one is bigger (more detail).

Cons: Colors aren't realistic. There are galaxies with bright colors, but usually those are composite images of different spectrums. However, if you've been following my work, you'll notice that red and blue contrast is a trend in works of mine, and i like how this turned out. If i was to go for realistic coloring, it would be desaturated yellow, pulling towards brown. Not very eye-pleasing. Regardless, with all i learned, i might make a pretty realistic one in the near future, because now i got a thing for galaxies.

Now, the story of the production.

During late june, i started a galaxy. It turned out ok, looked more like a nebula though. So i worked on it more and more. I was planning on making a piece with 3 galaxies. Long story short, after weeks of working on them, i decided that they sucked, and i trashed them. I started one from scratch, and in 2 days, i had something that was 10 times better than the other 2. Shows that the things learned paid off seemlessly. So i worked and worked and they got cooler by the minute.

Then came the stars. Oh boy were they hard. Too many, then too little, no structure, bad coloring, you name it! After some experimenting, i got a nice setup that was balanced. Of course, i researched a lot of galaxy imagery during the production.

Finally, the coloring. Lots of fun and frustration. It was a pain to get a contrasting coloration, yet trying to keep it balanced. But finally, it's done. Might not be realistic, but somehow i went the other direction. Sometimes you just gotta do what your eyes ask you to do, disregarding a brain that says "thats not the true color, foo!"

So, after over a month in the making, here it is. All kind of feedback is appreciated, as always. Enjoy it