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Note, I spent a lot of time over the one above. A lot more than the one I ended up with for the tutorial. So that's why the one at the end isn't all that great.
1. Make a new image, perfectly square. 400x400 is a good size, unless you're going for lots of details (which, for this tutorial, I'm not)
2. With the pixel brush, draw out the shape of your land. You could always use a map of the world, but then this whole tutorial would be completely pointless now, wouldn't it?
3. Fill in the land black
4. Duplicate the layer a few times to use later
5. Name the one at the top "land".
Make the white transparent.
Check the Keep Transparency box in the layers diologue.
6. Duplicate the land layer.
On the lower land layer, make a gradient like this one:
7. Mess around with the dodge and burn, and smudge tools, or any other ones you want.
I found the brush, "Galaxy, Small (AP)" came in very useful in this step.
8. on the upper land layer, render plasma with turbulance set to 7.
Desaturate the layer.
With the colour balance tool, make it a greeny-brown colour.
9. Set that layer's opacity to about 40.
Merge the two land layers.
10. Name one of your copied layers "water".
Fill the entire layer with a gradient like this:
11. Scatter HSV with settings like these:
12. Use a linear Motion Blur with length set to 20, and angle at 0
13. Bump Map the water layer with setting like these:
14. Apply Bump Map to the land layer with settings like so:
15. Create a new layer for clouds.
Render plasma (turbulance set to 7).
Desaturate the layer.
Set contrast to 110, brightness to -20.
IWARP the layer with lots of swirls.
Make the black transparent.
16. Make a new layer called "snow".
Draw fluffy stuff around the top and bottom with the Galaxy, Small (AP) brush (oh, so useful).
Smudge around the edges of it.
17. Merge all of the Layers together
18. File> Map> Map Object
19. These are good settings to use:
Play around with them yourself. Oh, and try to get the shine directly over water. It just looks better.
20. On the new image, create two new layers for the sky and stars underneath the layer with the planet.
21. Fill the lower one with black.
22. In the upper one, use a large brush in airbrush, set the mode to dissolve and opacity to 0.5
Draw around the planet on the stars layer
23. Duplicate the stars layer.
On the Lower layer apply a gaussian blur of 1.0 to give the stars a nice shine.
24. You may as well put in a supernova or two while your at it. Set the radius to no more than 3, and set the colour to pale gray.
Hope you enjoyed it! :D
