Gazing Balls
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Challenge 166 -- Image 1
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The gazing balls reminded me of planets, so I built my own version with stripes and rings. The planet is a circular selection filled with a color picked up from the spiral gazing ball in the original and then highlighted with a white to transparent radial gradient. The stripes started as thin filled selections that were warped with the distort>shear filter, fitted over the sphere and given a small drop shadow.

The rings began as concentric selections -- I filled them with noise, blurred the noise and then used levels to reduce it to irregular lumps of black and white. I deleted the black and then gave the remaining blobs an emboss style. The circles were then transformed with the perspective function and tilted around the planet -- I masked off the parts behind the planet and added a drop shadow opposite the light source.

The star field is two layers of my usual combination of texture>grain sprinkles masked with render>clouds and colored with a color adjustment layer set to color blending mode. A brush adds a few larger stars.

The spaceship is a filled ellipse with an emboss and outer glow layer style. The exhaust is a free hand swoosh with a noise filled mask with an added gradient to fade it.

Gazing Planet
All Images © by Original Owners; Other Images & Site © 2003-2008 R. E. Warren
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