I thought I'd start with some gas planet stripes before tackling a watercolour galaxy.

In the end I painted three sets then layered them and applied some blends in Affinity Photo to combine them before applying them to a sphere in Cheetah 3D.

Then I used Affinity Designer and Cheetah 3D to composite the following image. Inner and outer glows were added to the planet in Affinity Photo. The lens flare was added afterwards using Lensflare Studio.

 

This weekend I intend to go completely non-digital and paint some water-colour galaxies... Stay tuned.

Now it's the weekend, here's my attempt at a nebula bookmark...

I think I need to get some less aggressive masking tape. For the most part, this green decorators tape worked well, but delaminated the paper in one place.

 

 

It looks better in real life. The camera seems to increase the contrast between light and dark, highten the saturation, and pick up the paper's texture a bit too much.

Thanks Jessica. I really enjoyed working through this lesson.