More Planets

Earlier I tried drawing Earth-like planets.  I wanted to try a gas giant.  Here is the first shot at it:

Most of this is like the last project.  The difference is in coming up with the flat map for a banded gas giant rather than for land and oceans.  I finally cracked the code at the suggestion of someone online.  I wanted to create the bands in great detail, but drawing line after line in different colors seemed tedious.  He suggested taking a one pixel wide slice from a picture and then spreading it horizontally to get lines.  I used a slice through the red rocks near Sedona,  giving me nice Jovian colors.  I then blurred the lines and then used Photoshop liquify and a pen tablet to squiggle the lines.

The rest is just a series of overlays to give the colors a bit more variance, and the halo and dark side like the planets before.

The detail is pretty satisfying

One Comment

  1. Doug Proctor:

    Lover the colours - I'm a geologist and recognized the Arizona sandstone immediately. I wonder, though, while the technique is excellent for patterning in principle, whether it might be more realistic if you "sample" Jupiter instead. Then do the same extension. Actually, sample several times and layer/overlap them.

    To have that many bands suggests either a very high spin rate so that minor irregularities have enough energy to define themselves, or that the planet is far larger than Jupiter. Which would make it a protostar.