"Astronauts' Space"
by inoubli4ble
“Artists are low key astronauts. Instead of going to the moon, they sit back in their studio and make the moon.”
- Michael Bassey Johnson
The original sketch
My artwork "Astronauts’ Space" is inspired by a piece of art I saw on Pinterest. I liked the idea, but of course I didn't want to copy it 1 to 1 but bring in my own style. You can see the picture I was inspired by here. I wanted to add a ladder and some clouds to the image, but leave out the astronaut in the head/field. On my sketch you can see mountains, which I decided against in the course of editing. First I picked the images I needed from Unsplash.com. I chose a section of the picture and colored the astronaut's visor. Then I continued working on this layer.
Matching pictures
By having the layer I painted the visor on, I was able to place the image of the field and the moon, as well as the starry sky underneath it, filling in just the visor area, which turned out to be pretty effective since I didn't have to cut out anything extra. Then I painted in the ladder by hand and the shadow on the astronaut. Then I used a cloud brush to bring the clouds into the picture and thus draw attention to the center of the image. This effect I have still strengthened by setting brightness gradients (in the middle of the picture bright, outside darker). Then I played with the layer modes until I was satisfied. Finally, it was about the colors.
Colors and atmosphere
To match all the images I created several color filters, desaturated the entire image a bit and created a gradiation curve to boost the depths a bit, as I like to do. Finally, I was still unhappy with the color transitions in the very dark areas. So I used a blur and added some artificial noise. Then I added a few petals by hand and applied a motion blur filter. After that I was satisfied.
I hope you like it. Stay surreal!
