My Planet

I've been working off and on for a couple months on making a picture of the planet I made up called Mendril, where a story I'm writing takes place. At this point, I think this is about where my artistic talent tops out. I'd have loved to have been able to make it look as good as those wallpapers you see in the Science Fiction and Scenery sections in deviantart, but I guess it turned out ok all things considered.

I made it by drawing a world map of the planet on paper and scanning it in, and then coloring each part on a different layer in photoshop (oceans, reefs, icecaps, land, ect. all on different layers). I used the pictures of the Earth from Nasa's Blue Marble page to choose the colors. Once I reached a semi-satisfactory point in coloring it in, I used photoshop to sphereize a portion of it, put it on a black background, tilted it, and then had it speckled the background to look kind of like stars.

It's missing a lot of things, the land portions look pretty flat and uninteresting, there's no visible atmosphere, the clouds kind of suck since I copied and pasted them from a picture of the Earth, the rings the planet is supposed to have are completely missing, along with all three of its moons, the sun is shining on the wrong angle, it's tilted too far, and I've seen space done a LOT better than that. But I still figured I'd show it around a little, since it isn't really bad looking, and I'm kind of proud I got it that good looking without any talent beyond some basic photoshop knowledge. And if there's any way I can improve it, that'd be great to hear, since I've still got the (8.5 mb) layered file of the flat map of the planet.

And lastly, a quick warning - it's a pretty hefty download for modem users, even as a .png, at 1.1 mb. Here is is.