I Started Making A Galaxy Map

I saw a video, a good while ago, of a guy designing a galaxy map in Photoshop, and it was something I have wanted to do for a long time.

All of the science fiction stories I write are set in a fictional galaxy, which I have mapped out in my head, but designing an actual copy of it would obviously be better.

Today, I finally managed to get on and get it started, and I'm really happy with the results.

This is where I am now.

I'm really disappointed, because I had been documenting the entire process, from making the star brush to having it all filled out, but none of the pictures were saved.

I was using the Snippets feature by holding the Windows key + shift + S, and had no idea that I had to enable the clipboard for it to hold previous images.

I'm happy with the results of designing the map, but I'm really annoyed that I lost all of the progress shots I got.

Here is a close-up image of the map itself.

The large stars are planets, and the slightly smaller ones are points of interest such as space stations, moon bases, enclaves, and small colonies.

For the backdrop, I dropped a cluster of much smaller stars on one layer, then proceeded to copy and paste them. During this process, I did it on a handful of layers to make sure there were no repeating patterns.

I had four layers of background stars and set the opacity for each slightly above one another, to add depth.

The depth was slightly missing, though, so I made 4 new layers where I went through the map, dropping slightly larger stars occasionally. I did 4 passes using this process, raising the opacity each time, and I think I got a decent result.

After that, I added some colour in the form of nebulae. To do this, I took two pictures of smoke, added them and scaled them, then lowered the opacity, and traced over the lines with a brush, and I added some filters to it, but didn't like the results.

I done this a few times and it just didn't look good, so I decided to use photoshops in built AI and asked it to add a nebula over the coloured sections, and it did a pretty good job.

However, you may notice the large empty section of space in the centre, which is intentional, and I'm toying with the idea of completely removing the nebula from the centre, leaving it completely blank.

Tomorrow, I am going to start off and try that out, and if the stars align, I may even be able to draw in faction territories and space lanes.