Juno

Completed 2018-05-10. Available releases:

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The Juno spacecraft flies around Jupiter. This is my first digital painting. I did it with a mouse, but I also bought a drawing tablet, so in the future it turns out I improve.

I really like the texture I got on Jupiter (and apart from the border I feel like I really captured it properly overall, too!), although I should have used a brush with more angular variation.

For Juno, I didn't really get the colors right, but I'll chalk that up to the desaturating environment of space. If you look carefully, you can see a bit of Jupiter-shine on the backside, itself reflected off the backside of the solar panels. The thing on top is some kind of foil-covered antenna.

I used NASA's reference 3D model to get the outlines for the probe geometry. Jupiter is more-or-less traced from actual data (although if I'm not mistaken, the scale is wildly wrong here). I used a circular clipping mask on the edge, but it looked too artificial, so I fuzzed the edge, which I don't think produced a great effect. I drew on multiple layers and composited them, which is how I got the well-defined edges on the probe over the planet. Although I composed the outlines in Blender, I drew all shading by hand.

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