This was done in some bootleg version of Photoshop. It’s not the first piece of space art I created – there were some previous ones that I’ve completely lost – but it is one of my favorites.

To create this, I followed a bunch of tutorials on how to create star fields and planets. There’s very little actual drawing here – the planets were created through various filters, the stars were originally noise, and the star clusters are the result of the clone stamp tool. Also, Photoshop had a lens flair tool back then.

The translucent planet was originally going to be a normal-looking planet, but I was playing around with layer modes and found something that seemed pretty interesting.